writing a short reply on reading (at least 300 words)
Last week we left off at that height of the black power movement, one that was defined by increasingly critical responses to the growing representation and visibility for exceptional individuals from marginalized communities. Access to the proverbial table was becoming less so an issue about race but about upholding a particular culture, practice, and political economy as some of you pointed out. What would later become the notion of “exceptionality vs Disposability” discussed in Lipsitz’s piece in particular.
This week we’re forging a bridge between the periodization of the black power/freedom movement and the neoliberal period the emerges soon after in the late 1970s. It was right before this period that the latest iteration of black power had shifted away from cultural nationalism – a national identity built on shared culture, what Huey Newton disparagingly referred to as pork chop nationalism – to a broader definition of revolutionary politics, one that opens up a broader socio-economic analysis. In many ways, neoliberalism’s economic policies and social pedagogy was a direct response to the broader calls for radical distributive policies against racial capitalism.
This week’s question is two-pronged: How did the late Black Power movement begin to make connections across race AND class? How did this undermine the cultural nationalism that preceded it?
Bringing in neoliberalism, how have preoccupations with exceptionality exacerbated socio-economic divide? In other words, have the foundations of the unjust system critiqued by the black power movement changed with the inclusion of select individuals from marginalized classes? Why or why not?
Please reference a minimum of three sources including supplemental readings and videos.
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Download by: [University of California Santa Barbara] Date: 23 April 2016, At: 10:41
Souls
A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20
Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass
Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who
Leave
George Lipsitz
To cite this article: George Lipsitz (2015) Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass
Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who Leave, Souls, 17:3-4, 303-321, DOI:
10.1080/10999949.2015.1125185
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2015.1125185
Published online: 13 Apr 2016.
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Souls
Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4, July–December 2015, pp. 303–321
EDUCATION IN NEW ORLEANS: A DECADE AFTER
HURRICANE KATRINA
Challenging Neoliberal Education at
the Grass Roots: Students Who Lead,
Not Students Who Leave
George Lipsitz
The Students at the Center (SAC) learning community in New Orleans challenges the
premises of neoliberal education reform through an alternative social vision and an
oppositional social praxis. It encourages students to be people who lead their communi-
ties rather than people who leave. SAC presents a model of democratic and egalitarian
education that exposes, challenges, resists, and counters the enormous harm perpetrated
by the neoliberal reorganization of public institutions. The young people who participate
in the classes run by SAC view their own fate as individuals as linked to the survival,
dignity and democratic potential of all people.
Keywords: disposability, exceptionality, neoliberal education, New Orleans, story circles
The late Clyde Woods organized all of his scholarly work around one central
contention—that the key to the entire racial order of the United States emanated from
the history, politics, and poetics of the city of New Orleans and the hinterlands
surrounding it. This was a matter of the historical record for Woods, a function of
the foundational and formative economic and political power of the plantation bloc
in forging the nation as a slave holding republic and then authoring and authorizing
succeeding forms of segregation, debt peonage, land enclosure, labor exploitation,
incarceration, and containment. Yet Woods also insisted that the centrality of New
Orleans to the U.S. racial order did not end in the past, that the city continues to
be a crucible where new forms of calculated cruelty and organized abandonment
are perpetually produced, resisted, and countered. Attaching literal meaning to
ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online #�2015 University of Illinois at Chicago
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2015.1125185
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Martin Luther King’s figurative claim that an injustice anywhere is an injustice
everywhere, Woods argued that the persistence of racialized imbalances of resources
and power in New Orleans make the city a self-renewing laboratory for the present
day development of new neoliberal forms of dispossession and displacement.1 Woods
perceived correctly that New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have been laboratories
for neoliberalism, test sites for experiments in policies that subsequently became
embraced nationally by leaders of both major political parties, policies that include
deregulation and tax subsidies for large corporations, ecologically unsound develop-
ment, mass incarceration, draconian reductions in social spending, union busting and
the privatization of public education. Woods asked us to understand New Orleans not
as provincial backwater bypassed by history, but instead as one of the key places in the
present where our collective future is being created. “New Orleans is a not an excep-
tion,” Woods insisted, “New Orleans is our future.” What happens in New Orleans
today, he maintained, can happen anywhere tomorrow.2 Woods recognized that the
neoliberal reorganization of the school system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
in 2005 served as the key component in a “rebuilding” strategy for the Crescent City
designed to produce irreversible moves toward privatization, fiscalization and class
polarization that could then be exported elsewhere. As the Call for Papers for this spe-
cial issue of Souls observes “New Orleans style reform has been marked as a model for
other urban school districts throughout the United States.” Replacing open admission
public schools with selective private charters, shifting emphasis away from holistic edu-
cation toward preparation for competitive high stakes multiple-choice tests as part of a
punitive audit system rigged to take resources away from the students who need them
the most, and supplanting credentialed, experienced, unionized and lifelong New
Orleans resident teachers with inexperienced, unaccredited, temporary, transient volun-
teers imbued with an ethos of unctuous paternalism, school reform in New Orleans por-
tends similar schemes elsewhere.
Yet in the very locality where this toxic stew is being concocted, teachers, students,
parents, and community members rooted in the Black Resistance Tradition of New
Orleans have conjured up an alternative social vision and developed an oppositional
social praxis by forming the learning community they call Students at the Center
(SAC). Seeking “education for liberation, not mainstream socialization,” SAC con-
ducts classes for eleventh and twelfth grade students. Its instructors, Kalamu ya
Salaam, Jim Randels, Mosi Makori, and Ashley Jones reject completely the logic of
neoliberalism that revolves around binary oppositions between the worthy and the
unworthy, that extends full citizenship and social membership only to those it deems
exceptional while treating everyone else as disposable. The learning communities
that SAC creates in its classrooms and beyond encourage students to be people
who lead their communities rather than people who leave them. Deploying an inter-
active, collective, and improvisational pedagogy derived from the story circles of the
Free Southern Theater, these classes enable students to grapple with challenging
readings and connect them to their own lives, to write and critique collaboratively
the essays, reflections, and ruminations authored by other students and to test
their ideas in practice through engagement within activist movements for social
304 Souls July–December 2015
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justice. SAC presents a model of democratic and egalitarian education that exposes,
challenges, resists, and counters the enormous harm perpetrated by the neoliberal
reorganization of education.
Neoliberalism is not a unified theory, practice, or ideology. Like most hegemonic
formations it is a concept used to mark a historical moment of conjuncture, an amal-
gam of diverse and sometimes competing interests, strivings, practices, and processes.
One recurrent feature of neoliberalism is the assertion that capitalist market relations
should be the model for all social relations. In practice, this often means that exchange
value has innate social value and that people are consumers, investors, and owners
rather than workers, citizens, and community members.3
The key element in the neoliberal educational philosophy revolves around what
Chandan Reddy describes as the dialectical relationship between exceptionality and dis-
posability.4 Educational “reform” in New Orleans and other cities means providing the
appearance of a modicum of educational opportunity and economic mobility to a small
number of students judged to be exceptional, while writing off the rest as disposable.
High ability and high achievement students who are poor and Black are encouraged
by the school system to separate themselves from their surroundings, to seek opportu-
nities for themselves and to ignore their neighbors, relatives, and friends who are con-
signed to second rate schooling, who are then blamed, shamed, and punished as failures,
when in fact, it is the school system and the society that have failed them.
The high ability and high achieving young people who become part of SAC recog-
nize fully that the school system wants them to leave rather than lead their communi-
ties. In The Long Ride, an extraordinary book of essays and reflections by SAC
students and their allies, Christopher Burton recalls how his success in middle school
led to pressure on him and other successful students to separate themselves from
others, to perceive themselves as better and more worthy than the low performing
students, to abandon their friends and compete for slots in schools reserved for high
achieving students.5 Burton objects to those values. He describes them as reflective of
a larger system where “the privileged few get all the resources and the majority is
given close to nothing.”6 In the same volume, Sadiq Watson writes “The abandon-
ment of public schools and the separation of students continues to grow. When I
look at it, separation is wrong, but it is a common practice. People want to be on
top, which will always leave someone on the bottom.”7 Crystal Carr reports in her
entry that students at McDonogh #35 are taught to disassociate themselves from
the neighborhood that surrounds it. She relates this to a section she read in Barbara
Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker. In that book Ransby reports that when Ms. Baker
attended Shaw Academy and later Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, she
and other students were forbidden from interacting with local Black residents.8 Criti-
cal of the efforts by the culture of uplift in which she was raised to distance itself from
poorer, darker, and more vulnerable people in their own community, Ms. Baker went
on to an activist life that involved and served all strata of Black society—the town
drunk as well as the town doctor, the farmer as well as the pharmacist, the woman
who could not afford to buy a coat and the woman who owned a fur coat. Compar-
ing the rule in place at Shaw in Ms. Baker’s time with her own school’s similar policy,
Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina 305
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Carr contends “This rule created a separation that Ella Baker later fought against in
her civil rights and black power work.”9
Every weekday morning and afternoon, students in New Orleans high schools
gather for classes run by the SAC program. The class members include both African
American and Vietnamese American youths. These two communities do not share
the same bloodlines, but they do share complex and complicated histories of blood
shed that place the students in productive dialogue with each other. The narratives
the students write profit from both their similarities and their differences. Team
taught up through 2015 by public school teacher Jim Randels and Ninth Ward poet,
activist and educator Kalamu ya Salaam, and turned over to Mosi Makori and Ashley
Jones starting in the 2015–2016 academic year, these classes encourage listeners to
talk, require readers to write, and prompt witnesses to social injustice to take action
against it. Student writers gain authority by authoring narratives that authorize a dif-
ferent future than the one designed for them by the pain inflictors of this world. They
become urban alchemists, turning disadvantage into advantage, humiliation into
honor. They find value in undervalued people, places, and perspectives. The makers
and shakers and gatekeepers of this society generally do not look to them, or people
like them, for advice. They are not asked about the many things they know about the
problems caused by poverty, political powerlessness and mass incarceration. The
people in power generally do not care what they think, or even if they think. They
do not invite these young people into the circles where decisions are made. Yet as eye-
witnesses to the criminalization of poverty, the organized evisceration of the social
wage, the ravages of sexual racism, and the deadly consequences of prioritizing pun-
ishment instead of justice, these students have expert knowledge and advanced abili-
ties to solve serious social problems. No one has invited them to stand up, step up, and
speak up, so they invite themselves to be participants in deliberative talk and face-to-
face decision making. They write words that they hope can heal the wounds they wit-
ness every day.
In a city where neoliberal privatization schemes orchestrated by hedge fund
managers and backed by leaders of both major political parties have funneled money
to for-profit charter schools that are largely unaccountable to the communities they
serve, the SAC curriculum draws on resources of another sort, resources rooted in
student-based interactive leaning circles. In these classes, young people read and
write about racism, poverty, and mass incarceration. Perhaps most important, the
students work together every day in groups to acknowledge, assess, and analyze
how racism, poverty, sexism, and the organized abandonment of their neighbor-
hoods produce the radical divisiveness that encourages largely powerless people to
attack each other. The students write about absent and abusive fathers and mothers,
domestic violence, street crime, hunger, status rivalries, antagonisms, and arguments.
They see that in its final stages, attempted genocide can look like suicide. They know
all too well that individuals who have been hurt, may well want to hurt others.
Oppressed people find themselves compelled to compete with each other constantly,
to battle for scarce jobs, for romantic partners, for prestige. Drastic reductions in
employment in industrial and longshore jobs have given rise to a concomitant
306 Souls July–December 2015
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increase in service jobs and state employment, some of which require impoverished
Black workers to police, jail, and guard other Blacks. Under these conditions, it
should not be surprising that Black people can come to despise themselves and each
other, to discern in each other’s eyes a reflection of their own subordination and
humiliation. The people closest to them can come to seem unworthy of love. Yet
by addressing the hand they have been dealt by history openly and honestly, by
sharing their burdens, and by helping others recognize and respond to common con-
ditions, the students’ writings succeed in the arduous task that Lorraine Hansberry
described as the indispensable work of finding something left to love in others
and in ourselves.10
The pedagogy of SAC requires students to read challenging works by (among
others) Edwidge Danticat, Mark Twain, Michelle Alexander, and Virginia Woolf,
to connect the readings to their own lives, and to address big issues like segre-
gation, imperialism, and mass incarceration. Most of the students in these classes
do not own personal computers, so they compose their essays on phones, sending
their work to their instructors as e-mail attachments. They read out loud to the
other students from their phone screens during class. Listening and providing
criticism to others becomes as important as one’s own writing in this curriculum.
The instructors begin each session by asking one student to read the current draft
of his or her essay. After doing so, the student picks two other students to offer
comments. The “pick two” process allows for both predictability and rupture.
Some responders are chosen for their expertise about writing techniques. Others
get selected because their life experiences compare closely to that of the writer.
Some are prized because they are gentle with their critiques; others are valued
because they are blunt, forthright and thorough. Choosing a critic can depend
on how the author feels on that particular day or on the focal point of any parti-
cular paper. According to the teachers and teachers’ aides, eventually nearly every-
one is asked to respond to everyone else. The process allows for individual
differentiation, yet locates authority in the abilities and traits that the group
possesses as a totality. Through their individual writings and their shared conver-
sations the students transform the space of the classroom into a site of mutuality
and solidarity, a forum for deepening their collective capacity for mutual recog-
nition and respect for democratic deliberation and decision making.
The young people enrolled in Students at the Center classes, are told that they not
only have the opportunity to write, they have a responsibility to write. They are taught
that every problem has a solution, that meaningful work in the world can make a dif-
ference. During one class, a student reads a heart-wrenching story about a cousin who
is a few years older than she is.11 The young man had been a positive presence in her
life, caring for her when her parents were away, cheering her up when she was sad,
introducing her to fashions, fads and slang terms. One day he murdered another
youth and soon was sent off to prison. In her paper the girl acknowledged that he
was guilty. She is mad at him for committing the crime. She had long feared being
killed herself by a stray bullet fired recklessly by someone acting the way he did.
Her cousin’s incarceration strains the family’s already limited material and emotional
Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina 307
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resources in many ways. She is upset by the ways his incarceration taxes the family’s
fragile networks of support to the breaking point. Yet she has not stopped caring
about him or loving him. The murder, she wrote, was not the only act he ever
committed. For a while, the girl and her mother could visit the cousin in the Orleans
Parish prison. Despite the circumstances and surroundings, on those visits he seemed
to be the same person she remembered fondly. Yet when friends of the man he killed
learned where he had been incarcerated and when some sensationalized journalism
made it seem as if he was proud of the murder, the authorities transferred him to a
jail that was too far away for the family to visit regularly. The student poured forth
a complex mixture of emotions—shame about what he had done, anger toward
him because of the crime, fear for herself of being retaliated against, but also com-
passion for her cousin, his victim, and the victim’s friends and family for the suffering
they were all experiencing.
When it came time to “pick two,” she made what might have seemed like an odd
choice. One boy that she picked was not a surprise. He was someone selected by stu-
dents in this class over and over again. He was clearly the top student in the class, a
helpful and insightful critic able to make suggestions about both the form and the con-
tent of other students’ papers. He spoke quietly and respectfully, making intelligent
and valuable comments about how readers might misunderstand her words, pointing
out places that could use more elaboration. The author’s second choice in the “pick
two,” however, was a surprise. She selected the class clown, an impish, mischievous,
playful person who seemed to make light of everything, making jokes that often failed
to hit the mark about papers, other students and the class in general. In this instance,
however, he dropped his clownishness completely. He asked the writer if she felt
embarrassed sharing her story, wondering if she was afraid people would think badly
of her for having a cousin in jail, or for not simply condemning him and his actions
outright. The author responded carefully. She admitted that she had some trepidation
about writing the piece and reading it in public. “But you never know,” she asserted,
“who can help me if they know about what I’ve been going through.” Then she took a
long pause and said with emphasis, “or who I can help.”12 Her answer revealed a con-
viction that sharing a burden can lessen it, that helping others can be an indispensable
survival strategy, that moral decisions are neither simple nor easy. Her answer
resonated with the dialectical prescience of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that
the darkest moments of our despair can also be the first moments of our eventual
victory if we know how to use them properly.13
One part of the required curriculum of Students at the Center entails social
movement activism. The students not only study society and write about it, they also
take direct action to change it. Often, this activism addresses the issue of mass
incarceration that looms large in their lives. The United States incarcerates a greater
proportion of its population than any other nation in the world. The state of Louisiana
places a larger percentage of its population behind bars than any other state. The city
of New Orleans sends a greater proportion of its population to jails and prisons
than any city in Louisiana. The students live in the neighborhoods most impacted
by mass incarceration in the most impacted city in the most impacted state in the
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most impacted nation. It is hard to find even one student who does not have some
personal or family connection to the criminal justice system. A way they have discov-
ered how to engage with this system and its effects on their lives has been to assist the
local branch of the Innocence Project, the New Orleans Resurrection after Exoner-
ation re-entry project. The students write letters to inmates identified as wrongly con-
victed, and they join public campaigns attempting to win their freedom. One of the
recipients of their letters and a beneficiary of their activism has been Jerome Morgan.
Morgan is a native of New Orleans who was wrongly convicted of a crime that he
did not commit. He had been incarcerated in the state prison in Angola for nearly
two decades when the students came across his case in their readings about the
Innocence Project. In a community that rightly sees itself as at war with the criminal
justice system, a wrongly convicted inmate becomes an important symbol of—and an
imaginary surrogate for—the “rightly” convicted fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters,
sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews and neighbors whose
incarcerations cannot be so easily mourned or challenged publicly. Because of
racially targeted policing and prosecuting, and the mandatory sentences central to
the “war on drugs,” many of the people in jails and prisons have been convicted
of non-violent drug offenses and parole violations. Some of them have been home-
less, many have undiagnosed and untreated disabilities. Their offenses are often as
much crimes of condition as they are crimes of conduct. As Michelle Alexander
demonstrates in The New Jim Crow, possession of a small amount of drugs on an
inner city street is treated very differently than possession of the same quantity of
the same drug in a college fraternity house.14
The students’ correspondence with Morgan quickly extended far beyond initial
exchanges about Morgan’s innocence. In the process of working together to right a
legal wrong, Morgan and the students forged unconventional relationships with each
other based on mutual needs, interests and desires. In letters to their incarcerated
correspondent, students Wesley Alexander and Tareian King inhabited new identities.
At first, they wrote careful, tactful and polite messages, introducing themselves to a
man they had never met in person. His replies were gentle, humble and direct. As they
get to know each other through the letters, each writer discovered a void being filled.
King and Alexander are children whose fathers are no longer in their lives. Morgan is a
father whose incarceration largely severed his connections with his son, a rupture
exacerbated by the youth’s subsequent displacement to Georgia after Hurricane
Katrina. King found herself relating things in her letters to Morgan that she imagined
she would tell to a father if she had one in her life. She started to describe him as “my
new dad.”15 Alexander felt a similarly powerful connection to Morgan. “Growing up in
a world that exists beyond the walls of a prison hasn’t been so free for me,” he wrote to
the man that he too had come to relate to as a father. “That’s why I sympathize and feel
connected to you in this abstract way. I too await to one day be set free.” The gener-
osity, openness and love these young people displayed moved Morgan deeply. He
wrote them that “we need each other more than we know.” When he received Father’s
Day cards “from the very two children who have so proudly adopted me as the father
they never had,” Morgan experienced a new feeling of elation tempered with
Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina 309
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responsibility. He wrote to Alexander that he had found “great joy” and experienced
“an authentic happiness in being all that I desire for others to be to me and our people.
We have to be fun-loving and serious about affording the world with hope, justice and
peace.”
King and Alexander wrote letters in support of a new trial for Morgan, pointing to
flaws in the original trial unearthed by the investigations of the Innocence Project.
They took time off from school to be spectators in the courtroom when he appeared
at a hearing for a new trial. In what seemed to them like a miracle, their efforts paid off
when a judge ruled that Morgan had been wrongly convicted and was entitled to a
new trial. By the time Morgan was released, King and Alexander had enrolled in Bard
College in New York as part of a special recruitment relationship between that
institution and Students at the Center.16 During the spring break of his freshman year,
Alexander was able to travel to New Orleans to see Jerome Morgan as a free man for
the first time in eighteen years, albeit one waiting a retrial that could send him back to
Angola Prison. The pair showed up together at the SAC class at McMain, the school
that Alexander had attended. As the two of them sat together quietly in the circle, a
girl asked them “Are you two related?” A long silence followed. Wesley then gestured
toward Jerome and said quietly and firmly, “That’s my father.” Jerome gestured back
toward Wesley and said “That’s my son.” Seeing the opportunity to teach an impor-
tant lesson, ya Salaam explained that going back to the days of slavery Black people
could not always guarantee that their biological families could remain intact, so
they developed family-like relations with people who were not actually kinfolk. Even
today, he explained, we sometimes become family to people who are not really in
our family. Either misunderstanding the lesson, or else moved by the serenity and
strength displayed by Alexander and Morgan, the girl replied “I thought you two
looked alike.”
King, Alexander, and Morgan found a way to counter the system’s radical dehuma-
nization with determined and creative re-humanization. Their “family” ties had to be
forged, not simply found. College bound students King and Alexander rejected the
exceptionality/disposability binary to affirm their connections to a man convicted
of murder and locked up in prison for eighteen years. In a society that constantly
entices people to “want more” and “have more,” King, Alexander, and Morgan discov-
ered ways to “be more.”17 Ties to each other made them feel stronger as individuals. In
that respect, they follow in the footsteps of their enslaved ancestors who expressed
their love for one other by citing Proverbs 27:17 that says “as iron sharpens iron so
one person sharpens another.” People need people, not only for affection and security,
but to become sharper, smarter, braver, and better. Individual actions can fill personal
needs, but they also work to enable the entire community to survive. As musicologist
Christopher Small writes, in Afro-diasporic cultures, “the supreme value lies in the
preservation of the community: without a community for support the individual is
helpless, while with it he or she is invincible.”18
King, Alexander, and Morgan invented familial relationships to replace the ones
shattered by systemic social oppression. They are not alone in this ingenuity. Mosi
Makori after college came back to work as an advisor, community ally and now
310 Souls July–December 2015
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teacher for the community. He explains that an important party of his life story
entailed “adopting” Alabama activist Connie Tucker as his “Godmother in the Black
Radical Tradition.” He describes his subsequent work on behalf of wrongly convicted
incarcerated men as a kind of compensation and reparation for his feelings of personal
powerlessness. “I subconsciously aligned myself,” he reveals “with the opportunity to
possibly achieve for other black men what I was unable to do for the men in my family
including my father—resurrect them through exoneration.”19
The emphasis on mutual respect and recognition as the key to the Black
community’s survival, humanity and democratic hopes enables the creation of
“family” connections with people who are not blood relatives. An example of this pro-
cess took place on March 24, 2014 when Jerome Smith joined the afternoon session of
Students at the Center at McDonogh #35 in the Treme neighborhood. Smith began
battling segregation in New Orleans as a teenager when he was evicted from a street-
car for sitting in the section of the car designated for whites only. As a young activist
Smith sharply rebuked then Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s superficial under-
standing of the Black freedom struggle at a meeting that included James Baldwin
and Lorraine Hansberry. Smith participated in countless direct action protests aimed
at desegregating employment and public accommodations in New Orleans, helped
mobilize a vital support system in New Orleans for the Mississippi Freedom move-
ment, and even traveled to upstate New York to report on the situation in Mississippi
at a benefit sponsored by Hansberry. Donations collected at that meeting paid for the
station wagon occupied by James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner
when they were stopped and murdered by Klan members led by Neshoba County
Sheriff Wayne Raney and his deputy Cecil Price in June 1964. Smith has remained
in the forefront of activism for decades, fighting for educational equity, affordable
housing and political self-determination. Yet none of the students seemed to know
who this seventy-five-year-old man was or why he was in their classroom. Moreover,
his appearance seemed to signal a break with the standard security regime. In schools
where security guards vastly outnumber college counselors, it is not easy for outsiders
to enter the buildings. Visitors must notify the school in advance, check in with secur-
ity personnel by presenting a picture identification card, and walk through a metal
detector. Approved visitors are then given a stick-on name tag that signals that they
have permission to be in the school. Smith, however, ambled into the room in the
middle of the session with no name tag visible. As he took his seat in the circle,
Kalamu ya Salaam wanted the students to know who he was, so he joked, “Well, some-
body must have spilled a whole lot of sugar on the floor because we got a roomful of
roaches here today. Let’s have our new visitor tell us who he is.”20 In a deep resonant
voice, Smith declared “They call me Big Duck. Because when I was a little kid I was tall
for my age and when the other kids followed me, the people would say ‘there’s the big
duck and all his little ducks following after him.’ And I’m still Big Duck, and that’s
why I’m here today (pointing to the students) to see how all my little ducks are doing.
You know, I went to jail with Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi years ago and I’m here
today to let you know you have to work hard to carry on the struggle for our people.”
Still eager to let the students know who was in their midst, ya Salaam asked “But what
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is your government name?” Taking mock offense, Smith answered slowly “I am gov-
erned by the historical struggles of our people who have named me Big Duck.” Trying
again, ya Salaam asked, “Well what’s the name on your driver’s license?” Smith
winced and said “A driver’s license is only a document issued by the state that admin-
isters and controls us.” Laughing along with the rest of the class, ya Salaam asked,
“What did your parents name you?” Big Duck said calmly, “Oh. Jerome Smith.”
In the session that Big Duck attended, a student read her paper relating Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn to her life. She focused on the part of the novel
where Jim’s belief in magic serves as a locus of ridicule. The student explained that
she felt hurt by this part of the book. As an immigrant from Belize, she had known
people all her life who believed in magic. She discerned that the author of Huck Finn
wanted her to feel ashamed of these beliefs. She wondered if people like Jim and the
people she knew in Belize learned to believe in magic because so many horrible
things in the world go beyond rational explanation. “After all,” she argued,
“everybody in Huck Finn believed in slavery.” Big Duck and this young woman made
their arguments in different ways, but the 75-year-old activist and the 17-year-old
student together demonstrated the continuing trajectory of Black survival, Black
humanity, and Black democracy, providing current day manifestations of Cedric
Robinson’s argument that the Black radical tradition is first and foremost a
“collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and
motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the
ontological totality.”21
A two-tiered educational system harms all students, but it is especially damaging
to Black communities that have historically needed to nurture and sustain group
solidarity in order to survive. Neoliberal educational reform is thus not simply a
betrayal of the educational needs of the overwhelming majority of Black students,
it is also part of a concentrated political attack on the Black community as a whole,
one more manifestation of fifty years of policies designed to repudiate the politics
and reverse the gains enabled by the Black freedom movement of the mid-twentieth
century. The Black community made progress in that era by constituting itself as an
aggrieved and insurgent polity. To do so, it had to replace the radical divisiveness
among its members created by the injuries of racialized capitalism with a radical
unity that turned systematic dehumanization into exuberant rehumanization while
provoking bystanders to become upstanders. Martin Luther King, Jr. encapsulated
that transformation in the remarks he made to striking sanitation workers in
Memphis in 1968. King maintained that the strike proved that the “Negro Haves”
must unite with the “Negro Have Nots,” that the dignity and desires of the person
with no “D” were as important as those of the person with a “PhD,” that the indi-
vidual who had “no house” was as crucial to the movement as the person who went
to Morehouse.22 In a similar vein, the Mississippi Freedom movement developed
consensus-based participatory democracy in its organizing as a way of creating
solidarity across caste and class lines within the Black community, as a means
for building an alliance between the chicken eaters and the chitlin’ eaters,
the grip toters and the sack toters.23 Over the last four decades, a revanchist
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repudiation of this movement and its victories has revolved around efforts to grant
limited cosmetic concessions rather than making systematic changes in the social
order, to create and publicize what Charlotta Bass derided as the practice of placing
a few dark faces in high places rather than attending to the needs of the community
as a whole. As Cedric Johnson argues, the white power structure responded to the
egalitarian and democratic politics of the Black freedom movement by offering lim-
ited access into the system only to those people able and willing to serve as power
brokers, to become race leaders rather than revolutionaries.24 This process was pre-
figured, encapsulated, and emblematized by the response by leaders of the national
Democratic Party in 1964 to the demand by the elected representatives of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the party’s national conven-
tion as the recognized delegates from the state of Mississippi. Through a “compro-
mise” engineered by Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, the national party
chose to seat the entire delegation of white supremacists selected by the regular
party organization, but to also allow Black pharmacist Aaron Henry and white
sociologist John Salter from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to serve
as delegates at large. Henry and Salter could secure entry into the proceedings
for themselves, but only by promising to shut the door behind them, and exclude
the rest of the delegation. The national party officials could tolerate the presence in
their midst of a pharmacist but not a farm worker. They could offer inclusion to
one white ally, but not to an entire group of Black activists. As Robert Moses later
explained, the party was saying that the masses of poor and working class Black
people could be the recipients of other people’s largesse, but not authors of their
own fate. They could be represented by others, but were forbidden from represent-
ing themselves.25
Yet despite the enormously powerful repressive forces arrayed against it, the
radical edge of the Black Freedom Movement survived in dispersed sites and forms.
Social crises are settled, but never completely solved. The terms of order authorized
by temporary settlements never bring complete ideological closure.26 SAC exists
today and poses a challenge to the contemporary common sense of neoliberalism
precisely because it draws directly on the enduring influence of the Free Southern
Theater (FST), one important 1960s institution that survived the closures of the
era of repression and repudiation that took hold with the ascendancy of
neoliberalism.
The pedagogy, perspectives, and practices of SAC are grounded in the Black
Resistance Tradition of New Orleans, especially the “story circles” and attendant
forms of improvisational co-creation pioneered by the FST, which started at Tou-
galoo College in Mississippi in 1963, but moved its base of operations to New
Orleans in 1966. In that era, the organizing efforts of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) shook up social relations and fired up social
imaginations in communities throughout the south. Suddenly, the old ways of
doing things seemed obsolete and new ways of working seemed possible. Mass
mobilization entailed a vortex of creativity that threw forth a wide array of new
politics and polities, theologies and psychologies, pedagogies and aesthetic
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practices. In their work as field directors for SNCC organizing drives in Jackson,
Mississippi, FST co-founders Doris Derby and John O’Neal had been eyewitnesses
to the efflorescence of new desires, imaginations, and energies that the movement
provoked. Along with their Tougaloo colleague Gilbert Moses, they sought to
create a theater project that revolved around the democratic impulses of the move-
ment.27 As Moses explained in a manifesto co-authored with Tom Dent and
Richard Schechner, they believed that “There must be a form in which the theatri-
cality of the black church, the black freedom movement, black music, black
militancy—black power in its widest and deepest sense—can be made into myth,
allegory, public performance.”28
The adjective “Free” in the FST referred both to the freedom movement at large
and to the need for a theater free of white supremacist control and influence. The
group’s founders also believed that performances should be free of charge so that
poor and working class people would not have to pay a fee in order to be part of
the theater experience. The modifier “Southern” signaled the group’s commitment
to a particular constituency, to the sharecroppers, day workers, farmers, machine
operators, truck drivers and domestics they encountered in SNCC organizing drives.
These inflections of the adjectives “Free” and “Southern,” however, led to a modifi-
cation of the noun “Theater.” Plays that spoke to the needs of rural southern Blacks
had not yet been written. Performances aimed at a population dispersed throughout
rural areas and under intense surveillance by white supremacists generally could not
take place on stages in theaters but would have to be staged on an ad hoc and
impromptu basis in churches, barns, and open fields. In order to reach the people,
the artists needed to rethink the very concept of what theater is and what it can
do and should do.
In the performances of the FST, the process became part of the product. Plays
were not pure or autonomous works of art, but primarily served as provocations
for public discussions. In a letter to group member (and later renowned television
and film actor and novelist) Denise Nicholas in 1966, Tom Dent contended “Plays
have a value in themselves, if for us, they deal challengingly with the reality of the
black man in America. Plays then constitute a method by which an audience is
forced to face up to a reality about itself, and if a play is good, then it illustrates
before an audience a type of truth which cannot be stated as well any other
way.”29 As they took the stage, FST performers informed the audience that “you
are the actors.”30 They invited spectators to act and to interact, to engage with
the play as it proceeded and to participate in discussions about it afterwards. These
discussions often began with direct responses to the play, but quickly progressed to
conversations about ideas significant to the social and historical conditions of life
in the community. For example, a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot in Ruleville, Mississippi led activist, organizer and talented gospel singer
Fannie Lou Hamer to observe
Every day we see men dressed just like these, sitting around the bars, pool halls and
on the street corners waiting for something! They must be waiting for Godot. But
you can’t sit around waiting. Ain’t nobody going to bring you nothing. You got to
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get up and fight for what you want. Some people are sitting around waiting for
somebody to bring in Freedom just like these men are sitting here. Waiting for
Godot.31
The intensity, clarity, and creativity of audience discussions led to the development of
the story circle. The troupe initially performed plays they wrote themselves in addition
to works by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Ossie Davis, Berthold Brecht, and
Samuel Beckett. The eloquent and impassioned discussions that followed the
performances, however, opened a door to a different possibility, to the audience
collectively creating plays grounded in their own experiences and ideas. It was not just
that people had memorable things to say, but rather that group discussion enabled
them to take stock of their collective condition and linked fate. “Hearing is a creative
act,” John O’Neal observed, “the listening is what gives definition to the story.”32
Sitting in a circle and successively telling stories resonated deeply with long estab-
lished ways of knowing and ways of being in Black communities. In midnight prayer
meetings and frolics staged in brush arbors (sometimes called hush harbors) on slave
plantations, people from diverse African cultures fused themselves into a unified
totality through the Ring Shout, an African form that survived in America. It served
as a kind of lingua franca, a practice recognizable and valuable to people from dif-
ferent regions who worshipped different deities and who remembered their ancestors
in different languages, but who found common ground in the idea of a danced faith.
The Ring Shout always moved in a counter-clockwise direction. It required everyone
present to participate. Dancing together demanded coordinated movements to shift-
ing rhythms constructed by the group as a whole. Chanting and singing produced
both harmony and polyphony as diverse voices blended together differently each
time songs were song. The ring shout was both spontaneous and patterned, both
individually inflected and socially organized. Moving counter clockwise in a circle,
members of the ring clapped and danced while improvising verses in call and
response singing. Sterling Stuckey identifies the Ring Shout as not merely a perfor-
mance practice, but as the core component of a distinctly Black epistemology central
to the thought of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul
Robeson.33
The artist-activists in the Free Southern Theater had been trained as actors, play-
wrights, and directors. The process and products of the FST required them to rethink
their previous identities and to develop new ones. The respect, humility, and friend-
liness needed to forge reciprocal, trusting, and mutually accountable relations across
lines of caste and class challenged the individualism of the dominant art tradition. As
the FST became the foundation for a broader Black Arts movement grounded in
southern communities, and conditions, participating artists began to see that their
work more closely resembled the social relations of jazz musicians than those of thea-
ter professionals. As Kalamu ya Salaam observes, the collective identity superseded
but did not erase individual differences. “As far as we were concerned,” he recalls,
“just as most people didn’t know the names of all the members in a big band, they
didn’t need to know our names individually. The band was more important than the
soloist, in fact, it was the band that provided the platform for the soloists to blow and
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develop—even the most novice poet could be accommodated and given room to
recite at least one poem.”34
In creating SAC, Kalamu ya Salaam drew directly on the legacy of the FST. He had
collaborated with Tom Dent in 1966 to create the community based writing and act-
ing workshop BLAKARTSOUTH. Thirty years later, he brought the improvisational
story circle pedagogy of that group and the FST into the first SAC classes as Frederick
Douglass High School in the Ninth Ward. For two decades, SAC has challenged the
exceptionality–disposability paradigm. It teaches students that not only that they can
write, but that they must write. The project publishes books of writing by students and
their community allies that circulate in the community, that sit proudly on family cof-
fee tables, that are assigned as required reading in college courses. Students hold forth
on topics ranging from the failure to implement fully the desegregation mandates of
the Supreme Court’s Brown v, Board ruling to the positive and negative dimensions of
gendered identities in their lives. They recover and recount lost histories of slave
insurgencies and community mobilizations. They grapple honestly, realistically, and
sometimes painfully with the vexed and vexing nature of gendered hierarchies and
the contradictions of masculinity in community life. SAC also involves young people
routinely in activist social movement struggles for justice as a routine part of their
studies. The young people who participate in the classes run by SAC have skills,
abilities, and ambitions that might enable them to secure the rewards of exceptional-
ity, but the program encourages them to remain part of their community even as they
critique it, to view their own fate as individuals as linked to the survival, dignity and
democratic potential of Black people and of all people.
The harsh opposition between exceptionality and disposability that structures
public education “reform” in New Orleans today evidences the enduring costs of the
repression of the radical visions of 1960s the Black freedom movement and the ways
in which the common sense of neoliberalism seeks to make new insurgencies
unthinkable. As Lester K. Spence argues, neoliberal governmentality proceeds from
unquestioned assumptions about the naturalness and fairness of the capitalist
“market,” the value of competitive individualism and the substitution of private profit
for public provision. Systemic social problems are attributed to the private and
personal failings of unworthy individuals to be solved not by political deliberation
and decision making but by a combination of external technocratic expertise and inter-
nal self-management.35 In regard to race, this binary participates in a broader project of
managerial multiculturalism that offers partial inclusion to some Black people in order
to occlude, excuse and justify the impoverishment, immiseration, and subordination of
the great majority of the poor and working class of all colors.36 Through this lens, the
prominence of Barack Obama as one Black person in the White House erases the plight
of the more than a million Black men and women locked up in the big house.37 The
visibility of Oprah Winfrey as a Black woman with a net worth of three billion dollars
diverts attention away from the twenty-three million Black women who have an aver-
age net worth of less than one hundred dollars and a net worth of zero if they have
children.38 People with problems are portrayed as if they are problems.
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Neoliberalism is thus not just a set of economic policies and assumptions. It is a
social pedagogy that permeates every aspect of contemporary existence, from the cal-
culated cruelties of social policy to the sadistic competitions and perpetual stokings of
insatiable desires in popular culture, from the hostile privatism and defensive localism
that pervades prosperous propertied suburbs to the insecurity, uncertainty, and
unpredictability of low wage labor. Social practices, processes and institutions
function as self-reproducing mechanisms designed to create not only market-oriented
opinions and policies but market-oriented dispositions and personalities as well.
Educational reform in New Orleans and other cities is designed to legitimate the sub-
jection of people presumed to be failures who are unfit for freedom and to cultivate a
subjectivity of apolitical self-absorption in those deemed to be winners.39 The peda-
gogy of the FST and SAC represents the polar opposite of this perspective. Part of
the purpose of the story circle is to learn to value others. “Listening is always more
important than talking” in the story circle according to John O’Neal because “if you’re
thinking about your story while someone else is telling theirs, you won’t hear what
they have to say.”40 The respect that students gain for each other through this practice
prepares them to extend it to others in their community in their social activism. In
deepening their own personal capacities for critical thinking, creative problem solving
and lifelong learning, the students also deepen their collective capacity for democratic
deliberation and decision making. Reading historical accounts of previous Black
struggles for freedom by slave rebels, maroons, and civil rights and black nationalist
progenitors makes students question dominant ideas about failure and success. Com-
menting on reading about Nat Turner and other enslaved insurrectionists, Adrinda
Kelly writes in The Long Ride “There is no need for me to be ashamed. Slavery was
not a passive institution, and mine is not a race of domesticated animals.”41
The distinction between exceptionality and disposability that guides top down edu-
cational reform in New Orleans provides a template for an entire system organized
around the imperatives of displacement, dispossession, deportation and incarceration.
Neoliberalism punishes the poor. It promotes the secession of the successful from the
commons. It fragments the public realm, evades collective accountability, and
produces many of the very social problems it purports to solve. As economic theory
and practice, neoliberalism privileges the desires of investors and owners over the
needs of workers and consumers. It promotes the unfettered movement of capital
across borders while restricting the migration of labor. Neoliberal policies transfer
public resources into private hands, dismantle state funded social safety nets, reduce
progressive taxes on wealth gained through corporate profits, inheritance, and capital
gains while increasing regressive levies on wages, consumer purchases and user fees
for state services. Often described inaccurately as a preference for “small
government,” the neoliberal conjuncture in actuality requires “big government” to
spend money on war, incarceration and subsidies to corporations, but insists on
“small government” for the masses through reductions in social spending and barriers
against efforts by municipalities, states, and nations to regulate or tax the businesses
that make money in their jurisdictions.
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Neoliberal economic policies require ideological and political legitimation. They
author and authorize a widely shared common sense about how the world works.
The social warrant of neoliberalism conceives of society as an amalgam of atomized
individuals engaged in a relentless zero sum competition. The neoliberal project
needs to make inequality, exploitation and hierarchy seem natural, necessary, and
inevitable. It elevates enmity, envy, and contempt for others over mutual recognition
and respect. It substitutes individual consumer choice for collective political agency,
and substitutes revenge for justice. It offers wealthy people the promise of personal
autonomy free from any form of collective responsibility or accountability, while
making benefits to middle class or poor students, teachers, workers and welfare
recipients contingent on conforming to punitive, inflexible, and essentially rigged
audit systems designed to excuse and justify their abandonment by the state.
Neoliberalism promises people prosperity but gives them only austerity. It priva-
tizes reward but socializes risk. It offers the illusion of independence yet poisons the
well from which we all must drink. It fails to fulfill the promises it makes, but these
failures can never be allowed to be blamed on the system itself. The free market
fundamentalism that guides neoliberalism has no falsifiable hypotheses. When neo-
liberalism fails, the proposed solution is always more neoliberalism. As a result, a
neoliberal society needs to find scapegoats, to deflect attention away from its own
record. It stokes exaggerated fears of difference and mobilizes anger and resentment
against vulnerable populations. It renders those most in need as disposable, displace-
able, or deportable and then profits from their vulnerability, People who are locked
out of opportunities because of the locked advantages of the rich are then locked up
in prisons and jails. As Kalamu ya Salaam explains, under this system, people who
control virtually nothing are blamed for virtually everything, while people who
control virtually everything are blamed for virtually nothing.42
Ties to the legacies of BLAKARTS SOUTH, the FST, and the institutions and prac-
tices that inspired them, position Students at the Center outside of market time and
space. Their express commitment to the Black Resistance Tradition positions them as
critics and opponents of neoliberalism’s pernicious simultaneous disavowal and
deployment of racism. By focusing on market time rather than historical time and
portraying deeply political problem as purely personal issues of self-management,
neoliberalism relies on colorblindness and post-racialism. Yet the project of neoliber-
alism requires the relentless deployment of racism, because in actual historical time
the most effective way of delegitimizing public programs and institutions is to make
them synonymous with people of color. Neoliberalism’s presumed anti-statism does
not lead to challenges to state support and subsidies for corporate projects and profits.
As Ian Haney Lopez demonstrates, it is an anti-statist whiteness that deploys opposi-
tions between public and private, producer and parasite, exceptional and disposable as
distinctly racialized metaphors.43 Contempt for aggrieved racialized communities
provides neoliberalism with its prime justification and excuse. When neoliberalism
fails to deliver its promised prosperity, autonomy, and stability, and it always fails,
moral panics about the deficiencies of racialized others protect it from the scrutiny
and accountability it constantly proclaims but never practices. The location of SAC
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in expressly racial histories and anti-racist practices distinguishing it as one of the
fleetingly visible but powerfully instructive alternatives to the hegemony of neoliberal
market time and place.
In promoting education for liberation rather than for mainstream socialization, by
encouraging students to be people who lead rather than leave their communities, and
by teaching students to compile portfolios of writing, co-author books, and engage in
concrete struggles for social justice, SAC defies the dominant logics, imperatives and
favored subject positions of neoliberalism. By pursuing a logic grounded in historical
time and collective accountability, they are like to be illegible or deemed illogical by
those in power. Yet they are not alone. In Los Angeles, homeless activists and
advocates demand a role in urban planning for people without property and argue
that the way to make downtown safer is to have less police presence and fewer arrests.
In Houston, artists, activists, and community residents associated with Project Row
Houses purchase and restore row houses not for resale but as residences for single
mothers with children attempting to finish college. They argue that the use value to
the neighborhood of meeting the desperate housing needs of women attempting to
be educated and helping them raise their children in a safe and supportive environ-
ment is more important than the profits they would make from the exchange value
of these homes if they sold them and allowed the neighborhood to be gentrified.44
The calculated cruelty that permeates our society produces enormous suffering. It
is depressing to consider the depths, duration and dimensions of white supremacy, of
sexism, classism, imperialism and homophobia. But it is not at all depressing to
realize that a new generation is on the scene armed with knowledge, a determination
to struggle and the lessons learned from centuries of battles for survival, humanity
and democracy.
Notes
1. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta
(New York: Verso, 1998). The plantation bloc supported the “southern strategy” that enabled
Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to win elections and
implement policies that made national policies based on the plantation bloc’s views of civil
rights laws, welfare policies, criminal justice and taxation. In the 1990s, the majority leader
in the Senate was Republican Senator Trent Lott from Mississippi and the chair of the Repub-
lican National Committee was former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. The bloc also
promoted the electoral success of Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Wil-
liam Clinton and their policies of “ending welfare as we know it,” mass incarceration, and
deregulation.
2. Clyde Woods, “Concluding Remarks,” Reimagining the Global South Conference, Santa Bar-
bara, CA, January 21, 2011; author’s notes.
3. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After neoliberalism: Analyzing the
present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 9; Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Poli-
tics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 140.
4. Chandan Reddy, “Plenary Discussion,” Anti-racism Inc./Works Anti-conference, Santa Bar-
bara, CA, May 16, 2014; author’s notes.
5. All student names used in this article are authors in books available to the public published or
in press by Students at the Center.
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6. Christopher Burton, “Raising a Ruling Class,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd
ed. (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 301.
7. Sadiq Watson, “Public Means for Everyone,” in The Long Ride, 2nd. ed., by Students at the
Center (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 261.
8. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
9. Crystal Carr, “Separate But Equal,” in The Long Ride, 2nd ed., by Students at the Center (New
Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 258.
10. Tricia Rose, “Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and the ‘Illegible’ Politics of (Inter)Personal
Justice,” Kalfou 1 no. 1 (2014).
11. Author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans, Louisiana.
12. Ibid.
13. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 68.
14. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New
York: New Press, 2010).
15. All quotes from this correspondence are from the as yet uncontracted manuscript by Students
at the Center “Go to Jail” in the author’s possession. Quoted with permission from Students
at the Center.
16. It is of course possible that the Orleans Parish School Board, which has allowed ninety
percent of the public schools in New Orleans to be charter schools, will claim credit for
the success of King and Alexander, and identify them as exceptional. They do have strong
role models, however, in Ashley Jones and Mosi Makori, once students in the system who
are now SAC teachers.
17. The phrase “to be more rather than to have more” comes from the martyred Salvadoran
Archbishop Oscar Romero.
18. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African
American Music (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 86.
19. Quote from Students at the Center, Go to Jail, manuscript in author’s possession.
20. All quotes in this section are from the author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans,
Louisiana.
21. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.
22. Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 171.
23. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 140.
24. Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African-
American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
25. Freedom on My Mind, directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford (Clarity Educational
Productions, 1994).
26. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After Neoliberalism: Analyzing the
Present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 20.
27. Catherine Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys’: Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater,
and the Search for a Second-line Literary Aesthetic in New Orleans,” Journal of American
Ethnic Literature 1 (2011): 56.
28. Gilbert Moses, Thomas C. Dent, and Richard Schechner, “Preface,” in The Free Southern
Theater by the Free Southern Theater, ed. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner (Indiana-
polis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), xi.
29. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner, editors, The Free Southern Theater by the Free
Southern Theater (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), 115–16.
30. Dent and Schechner, The Free Southern Theater, 24.
320 Souls July–December 2015
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31. John O’Neal, “Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theatre,” The Drama Review
12 no. 2 Summer (1968): 76.
32. Catherine Michna, “Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and Fate of
Neighborhood Public Schools in New Orleans,” American Quarterly 61 no. 3 (2009): 539.
33. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(New York: Oxford, 1987).
34. Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys,‘” 56.
35. Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black
Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 153.
36. Reddy, “Plenary Discussion”; James Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multicultur-
alism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2004.
37. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “While we may have one Black man in the White House, we have one
million Black men in the big house,” quoted in Leewana Thomas, “American Studies Keynote
Advocates Student Activism,” Mac Weekly, February 18, 2011.
38. Kimberly Gedeon, “Challenges Black Women Face in Wealth-Building,” Madame Noire April
9, 2015, http://madamenoire.com/524915/the-challenges-the-black-women-face-in-wealth-
building/ (accessed May 27, 2015).
39. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” 153.
40. John O’Neal, “Guidelines for Story Circles” in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative
Transformation of Conflict, ed. Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutierrez Varea, and Polly O.
Walker, Building Just and Inclusive Communities, vol. II (Oakland: New Village Press,
2011), 214.
41. Adrinda Kelly, “Resistance,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd ed. (New
Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 50.
42. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Poetic Visions” (presentation, American Studies Association annual
meeting, November 5, 2009; University of California Center for Black Studies Research),
DVD.
43. Ian Haney Lopez, “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Obama,” California Law Review 98 no. 3 June (2010).
44. Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton, editors, Policing the Planet (New York: Routledge,
2016); George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2011), 149–66.
About the Author
George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. He studies social movements, urban culture, and
inequality. His books include Midnight At The Barrelhouse (2010), Footsteps In
The Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (2007), The Possessive Investment
In Whiteness (2006), Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (2001), and A Life In The Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition
(1995). Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American
Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing
Alliance. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin.
Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina 321
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Paradigm Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Black Scholar.
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Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement
Author(s): Peniel E. Joseph
Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 31, No. 3/4, BLACK POWER STUDIES: A NEW SCHOLARSHIP
(FALL/WINTER 2001), pp. 2-19
Published by: Paradigm Publishers
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41069810
Accessed: 26-03-2015 22:18 UTC
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Black Liberation Without Apology:
Reconceptualizing the
Black Power Movement
by Peniel E. Joseph
recent emergence of historical schol-
arship related to Black Power radicalism
represents a new phase of civil rights history
that might best be described as “Black Power
Studies.” In contrast to the thick historical
scholarship on the Civil Rights, the systemic
study of the Black Power era has, until
recently, remained elusive for at least four
reasons.1 First, the last quarter-century has
witnessed a full-scale retreat from the protest
politics that were a hallmark of the Civil
Rights and Black Power movements. Second,
historians and professional scholars have
been, for the most part, unwilling to
research the movement on it own terms, pre-
ferring instead to characterize Black Power
as the “evil twin” that wrecked civil rights.
Third, the seeming lack of archival material
on this era has served as a drawback to in-
depth research. Only recently have impor-
tant papers of key activists been archived and
made accessible. Many more will need to be
unearthed before historians can craft a fuller
view of this period. Finally, the Black Power
era has not been taken seriously by main-
stream scholars. While we have a good num-
ber of autobiographies from movement par-
ticipants, scholars have only begun to scratch
the surface of the rich history, insights, and
lessons that this era can offer. The negative
association of violence with political radical-
ism only partially explains this scholarly eva-
sion. Black Power remains a “hot potato”
that many are fearful of touching, lest they
be burned by the forces of reaction that con-
tinue to demonize this era.2 However,
renewed interest in black political radicalism
by both professional scholars and political
activists reflects the continued resonance of
postwar black political radicalism.
The new Black Power scholarship fits with-
in a conceptual framework that situates the
civil rights and Black Power eras (1954-1975)
as part of a broader black liberation move-
ment.4 Significant aspects of the first half
have been elegantly rendered by major his-
torical studies, while the second half has lan-
guished. This is unfortunate since black radi-
cals existed, and very often struggled
alongside of, more reform-minded political
activists and organizations. The intellectual
and cultural commentary, critiques, and
books produced during the Black Power
movement provide the raw materials for the
field of Black Power Studies. However, this is
not to suggest that Black Power was primarily
an academic exercise. On the contrary, Black
Power was a political movement whose rever-
berations touched major aspects of Ameri-
can and global intellectual culture – which
paved the way for thousands of works, both
political and polemical, analyzing and advo-
cating multiple political agendas and per-
spectives. The focus on Black power intellec-
tual production is not an attempt to reduce
the era’s concerns to ideological, cultural,
and political debates. While these were
undoubtedly important, the Black Power
movement advocated the radical transforma-
tion of American society. Nor am I suggest-
ing that Black Power Studies existed simulta-
neously with the Black Power movement.
Rather, I argue that the Black Power move-
ment opened up new and innovative fields of
intellectual inquiry. At times this was done
very consciously by specific activists and ort-
Page 2 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 31, NO. 34
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ganizations. At other times it was the indirect
outcome of fierce political struggles for sur-
vival.
The intellectual production during the
Black Power era displayed at least three dis-
tinct tendencies. Black Power political
activists produced numerous pamphlets,
books, speeches, and essays for the sake of
social, political, and cultural transformation
of American and world society. While much
of this material was intellectually sophisticat-
ed and is useful for contemporary scholars,
the purpose was less an academic exercise
than a training, critical thinking, and
methodological creativity to fashion a theo-
retical basis for the Black Power movement.
This black intelligentsia merged activism and
intellectual production, arguing that the
movement for social and poltical transforma-
tion required a critical and politically
engaged community of black scholar-
activists. The final group consisted of disen-
gaged academics who analyzed the politics of
the era, while not participating in either
poolitical or intellectual activism. Black
Power radicalism was a direct outgrowth of
the creative, ideological, and political ten-
sions during the first phase of civil rights,
which was marked by direct action and a
strategic adherence to non-violence.
essay examines the latest phase of
Black Power Studies through an exami-
nation of the strengths and weaknesses of
recent historical, literary, and political works.
It defines and examines four phases in Black
Power Studies and suggests that the latest
stage provides the foundation for a historical
framework for the study of black radicalism
in the post war era. The first stage occurred
during the immediate Cold War years and
predates the formal declaration of Black
Power in 1966. The second stage was both a
documentation and by-product of ongoing
Black Power activism. The third stage pro-
ceeded in the aftermath of the Black Power
era. The fourth and most recent stage has
witnessed the most systematic analysis of the
movement to date.
The literature reviewed, with few excep-
tions, was written by the black women and
men who were active participants, observers,
activists, and intellectuals during and after
this era. This is not to ignore the works of
the white historians and journalists who have
analyzed the movement. Rather, my analysis,
similar to the Black Power movement itself,
places black folk and their activities at the
center of a radical social and political move-
ment that attempted to transform American
and world society. The Black Power move-
ment provides an important prism for the
examination of a host of issues including but
not limited to urban studies, black electoral
politics, the Black Arts movement, feminism,
labor movements, black studies, prison
movements, and international decoloniza-
tion efforts.
The First Stage:
“A New Perspective Opens Up”
FIRST STAGE OF BLACK POWER STUDIES
originated in the Cold War political
repression of the 1950s.6 The works pro-
duced during this period were the products
of contentious political struggle that com-
prise a towering legacy for the discipline of
Black Power Studies. This era ushered in a
winter for radical politics in general, and was
catastrophic for black luminaries including
Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hut-
ton and W.E.B. Du Bois. Although severely
hampered by Cold War liberalism, black rad-
icalism continued to percolate beneath the
surface of civil rights orthodoxy and, at
times, held center stage in dramatic fashion.7
During this era African-Americans joined
arms with people of color globally to stave
off political oblivion. Looking outward for a
way forward at home, black radicals were
inspired and invigorated by global events
including anti-colonial uprisings in Ghana,
Cuba, and the African Congo. Domesticated
African-American perspectives on the Black
Power era ignore connections to internation-
al global politics.8 Richard Wright’s insightful
works {Black Power, The Color Curtain, and
White Man Listen!) of the 1950s ushered in a
scintillating wave of political and cultural
criticism that anticipated the major themes
of radical internationalism, Third World soli-
darity, and anti-colonialism that would char-
acterize the Black Power era.9 Published in
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1954, Wright’s presciently titled Black Power
placed political developments in the soon to
be independent republic of Ghana (the for-
mer Gold Coast) within a larger historical con-
text. Two years later, Wright’s The Color Curtain
further developed this global perspective, by
arguing that the 1955 Bandung Conference in
Indonesia represented a repudiation of West-
ern imperialism by the Third World.10 The
final part of Wright’s anti-colonial trilogy,
White Man Listen! (1957), analyzed the ways in
which non-whites perceived white supremacy.
Similar to Wright, Paul Robeson’s defiant
autobiography Here I Stand challenged white
supremacy even in the face of “thunderbolts
of… displeasure and rage.”
Richard Wright and Paul Robeson
represent cogent examples of black rad-
icals being deeply influenced by internation-
al events. The legacy of the black anti-colo-
nial Left was also reflected by individuals
such as Vicki Gar vin, William Worthy, and
Robert F. Williams. Garvin’s political activi-
ties led to her expatriation to Ghana, while
Worthy became the black radical foreign cor-
respondent of the era traveling to Indonesia,
Cuba, and Africa at great personal and pro-
fessional cost. Williams’ s Negroes with Guns
(1962) documented the ex-NAACP leader’s
heroic efforts to counter anti-black terror in
Monroe, North Carolina; a stance that ulti-
mately led to Williams’ exile in Cuba, China,
and Africa for almost a decade. One year
later, veteran labor radical James Boggs, who
mentored several generations of black radi-
cals, including future Black Power militants,
published The American Revolution: Pages From
a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963), in which he
examined the intersection of race and class
politics on the urban terrain.
Black Power internationalism not only
permeated these works, but also the black
radical press. Periodicals such as Shirley Gra-
ham Du Bois’s Freedomways (a continuation
of Paul Robeson’s short-lived Freedom newspa-
per), Robert Williams’s self-published Cru-
sader, the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad
Speaks, the Revolutionary Action Movement’s
Soulbook and Black America, Dan Watts’s Liber-
ator, and Presence Africaine highlighted the
international dimensions of domestic civil
rights struggles. This first set of historical writ-
ings, analyses, and editorials anticipated, and
at times explicitly articulated, themes of anti-
colonialism, self-defense, class struggle, and
radical humanism15 that characterized the sec-
ond stage of Black Power Studies. For exam-
ple the New York City based newspaper On
Guard argued that “Cuban events have a
direct bearing on our century long struggle
against segregation and lynch justice, our
legal battles and mass demonstrations for
equality of opportunity and rights against the
government’s continuing Jim Crow policy and
practices. A new perspective opens up.” This
last line reflected a growing radicalism that
existed alongside Cold War excess and perme-
ated aspects of the Civil Rights movement.
The Second Stage:
From Autobiography to Political Analysis
A UTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIRS have histori-
jljl cally dominated works documenting
the Black Power era.17 Therefore, it should
come as no surprise that the publication of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) repre-
sents the first salvo in the most self-referen-
tial stage of Black Power Studies. Written
with the journalist Alex Haley, the posthu-
mously published Autobiography was an imme-
diate bestseller that revealed both the impor-
tant themes that would characterize Black
Power literature during this period and the
growing acceptance of radical writings in the
mainstream publishing industry. At first
blush, the autobiography’s riveting narrative
of Malcolm’s ascent from prison to respected
international leader seems to represent what
John Edgar Wideman has described as a
“neoslave narrative.” According to Wideman,
such narratives erase the possibilities of radi-
cal systemic change by focusing on the
exploits of heroic individuals:
Although the existing social arrangements may
allow the horrors of plantations, ghettos, and pris-
ons to exist, the narratives tell us, these arrange-
ments also allow rooms for some escape. Thus the
arrangements are not absolutely evil. No one is
absolutely guilty, nor are the oppressed (slave,
prisoner, ghetto inhabitant) absolutel^^uiltless. If
some overcome, why don’t the others?
The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains sig-
nally important in that it transcends the
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clichés of both the antebellum and the con-
temporary slave narrative. Malcolm’s person-
al transformation provides the context for
his prolonged radical political engagement.
More then just a narrative history describing
individual transformation, the Autobiography
details the processes that surround attempts
at systemic political transformation against
extraordinary odds. Malcolm X’s death
heightened the contradictions within Ameri-
can democracy – triggering Shockwaves that
emboldened African-American radicals.
PUBLISHED
ON THE HEELS of this explosion
Stokely Carmichael’s and Charles Hamil-
ton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (1967) provided the richest, and in
many ways, the most important theoretical
and political definition of a movement that
would remain ill-defined during, and long
after, its heyday. The increasingly strident
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and polit-
ical scientist Charles Hamilton intended
Black Power to pragmatically shape the bur-
geoning and somewhat inchoate Black
Power movement. Simultaneously, the work
was a theoretical piece of committed scholar-
ship that represents an enduring classic in
the field of Black Power Studies. Indeed,
written amid the urban upheavals when it
seemed as if America would burn in atone-
ment for its racial sins, the book provided a
glimmer of hope against what most
observers saw as an uncertain future:
This book presents a political framework and ide-
ology which represents the last reasonable oppor-
tunity for this society to work out its racial prob-
lem short of prolonged destructive guerrilla
warfare. That such violent warfare may be
unavoidable is not herein denied. But if there is
the slightest chance to avoid it, the politics of
Black Power as described in this book is seen as
the only viable hope.
Although presented as laying the groundwork
for the political framework of the movement,
Carmichael and Hamilton took pains to make
no claims of a monolithic concept of Black
Power. Accordingly, the authors argued that
the movement’s dynamism lay in its creativity
and experimentation:
[B]lack people must organize themselves without
regard to what is traditionally acceptable, precise-
ly because the traditional approaches have failed.
It means that black people must make demands
without regard to their initial “respectability,”
precisely because “respectable” demands have
not been sufficient…. We must begin to think of
the black community as a base of organization to
control institutions in that community.
!
This experimentation would ultimately lead
to a redefinition of black citizenship:
Black people must redefine themselves, and only
they can do that. Throughout this country, vast
segments of the black communities are begin-
ning to recognize the need to reclaim their histo-
ry, their culture; to create their own sense of
community and togetherness. There is a growing
resentment of the word “Negro,” for example,
because this term is the invention of our oppres-
sor; it is his image of us that he describes. Many
blacks are now calling themselves African-Ameri-
cans, Afro-Americans or black people because
that is our image of ourselves.22
At once a political and polemical historical
work, Black Power’s stress on experimentation
and redefinition connected political trans-
formation to an ideological framework based
on creativity, innovation, and flexibility. In
other words, a program that could meet the
explosive changes that were daily occur-
rences during this era.
Carmichael and Hamilton looked
toward the future, Harold Cruse’s Cri-
sis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) attempted to
analyze the era by examining the past with a
vengeance. Even before the publication of
his magnum opus, Cruse was one of the most
widely read and controversial social critics of
the era. Considered a hero and sage by
young radicals during the Black Power era,
Cruse became the movement’s chief critic
during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Crisis of
the Negro Intellectual became a best-seller and
the unofficial bible of revolutionary nation-
alists. Praised as much for its strident cri-
tique of the white Marxist Left24 as it was for
its repudiation of assorted black leaders, the
book revealed major schisms within black
politics. Yet to read Cruse’s major work as
simply an ideological attack on Marxism
would be a mistake. The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual was the culmination of Cruse’s
long attempt to construct a philosophy of rev-
olutionary black nationalism that stood out-
side the parameters of conventional interpre-
tations of black radicalism. Moreover, Cruse,
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who fought to craft an indigenous theory of
black American resistance, analyzed the cul-
tural politics of race in American society and
the role of black intellectuals in the Ameri-
can cultural and political arena.25
/Criticized now and at the time of its pub-
‘^>l lication as being personally motivated
and containing historical and conceptual
inaccuracies, Cruse’s writings and political
activism remain crucial to understanding the
trajectory of African-American political
thought during the Black Power era. The
enduring strength of Cruse’s work has less to
do with its historical accuracy than the tone
and timing of its publication. For a genera-
tion of young black radicals, Cruse’s work
was their first introduction to the complex
history of black radicalism. Perhaps the most
controversial aspect of The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, Cruse’s concluding chapter,
“Postscript on Black Power – The Dialogue
Between Shadow and Substance,” leveled a
cogent critique against the conservative poli-
tics inscribed within Black Power discourse.
Recognizing the conservative black econom-
ic nationalism that undergirded strains of
Black Power rhetoric, Cruse asserted that the
“slogan actually represents a swing back to
the conservative nationalism that Malcolm X
had just departed.”27
While many dismissed The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual as a personally motivated
attack on the black Left by a disgruntled
opportunist, radical political theorist Robert
L. Allen focused on the theoretical implica-
tions of Cruse’s treatise. Published in 1969,
Allen’s important book Black Awakening in
Capitalist America, while acknowledging the
significance of Cruse’s work and its impact
on black nationalist thinking, found Cruse’s
construction of cultural hegemony within
American political economy flawed. Accord-
ing to Allen, one of the book’s central errors
was its “failure to establish, by argument or
evidence, his central thesis concerning the
salience of the cultural apparatus and the
projected cultural revolution.”28 Moreover,
Allen argued that Cruse over-emphasized the
power of black intellectuals. Therefore,
Cruse, while ostensibly calling for a dynamic
and creative black intellectual elite, failed to
critique the elitism that was intrinsic to the
conception of the “talented tenth.” Finally,
Allen charged Cruse’s solution of black con-
trol of America’s cultural apparatus as being
piecemeal, rather than radical. Black Awak-
ening in Capitalist America’s chief strength is
in its unapologetic intellectual analysis and
interrogation of the Black Power movement.
the decade of the 1960s drew to a
tumultuous close, Allen was by no
means alone in attempting to make sense of
it all. The movement’s intellectual shock-
troops consisted of rank-and-file activists,
workers, student journalists, and intellectu-
als. At the grassroots level, James and Grace
Lee Boggs best represented this intelli-
gentsia. A black radical auto-worker, Boggs
and his Chinese-American wife Grace Lee,
were permanent fixtures among Detroit’s
vibrant black radical community. A one-time
ally of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James,
Boggs provided vivid theoretical and practi-
cal insights that went beyond “Black Marx-
ism” to craft a framework for Black Power in
urban centers in pursuit of a radical humani-
tarian philosophy. In addition to numerous
pamphlets, Boggs’s Racism and the Class
Struggle: Further Pages from a Workers Notebook
(1970) and Revolution and Evolution in the
20th Century (1974), written with Grace Lee
Boggs), provide the best examples of the
attempts by activists to undergird Black
Power rhetoric with both a practical and
intellectual base.30 By the late 1960s and early
1970s black radical books and other publica-
tions cropped up on virtually every college
campus and major city in the U.S. Leading
periodicals, in addition to Muhammad Speaks,
Liberator and Freedomways, included Negro
Digest/Black World, The Black Scholar, Soulbook,
and The Black Panther Intercommunal News Ser-
vice. In addition to thse sources, a radical
intelligenstia that incldued Vincent Harding,
William Strickland, Stephen Henderson, and
Howard Dodson attempte dto provide a
practical and theoretical framework for
Black Power through the ambitious Institute
of the Black World (IBW).31 This intellectual
movement sought to contextualize the rapid-
ly growing Black Power phenomenon, reach-
ing its peak during the first half of the
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1970s.32 Of course black activists and intellectu-
als were not the only ones analyzing the era. At
times white analysis of the period crossed the
line of professional inquiry into overt fetishism
and venality. In other cases heartfelt attempts
such as August Meier and Elliot Rudwick’s
Black Protest in the Sixties (1970) fell short of
fully comprehending the period’s complex
redefinition of black nationalism and identity.34
many instances attempts to articulate a
theory behind Black Power were over-
whelmed by the immediacy of developing
political events. Instead, political memoirs and
autobiographies dominated both the second
and third stages of Black Power Studies. This
phenomenon was based in part of the success
of trade publishers in marketing the move-
ment through iconic personalities and organi-
zations – most notably the Black Panthers. The
Black Panthers, the most widely publicized
and arguably the most influential, as well as
the most misunderstood Black Power advo-
cates, published both political memoirs and
autobiographies during this period. Eldridge
Cleaver’s Soul On Ice (1968), although written
before he joined the Black Panther Party,
solidified his growing reputation as a hero of
the radical Bay Area New Left.35 Black Power
advocate H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die (1968)
was a simultaneous serving of autobiography
and polemic that remains a sharp example of
the apocalyptical sentiments that permeated
the era. Panther chairman and co-founder
Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time: The Story of the
Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1970)
was both a political history of the party’s for-
mation and a polemical repudiation of the
incarceration of Minister of Defense Huey P.
Newton.3 Huey Newton followed with the
autobiographical Revolutionary Suicide (1972)
that, similar to the experience of Malcolm X,
Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson,
revealed the author’s spiritual and psychologi-
cal transformation while incarcerated.38 New-
ton would write two more books and a doctor-
al dissertation that detailed his political
philosophy and experiences with the party.39
WORKS OF BLACK PRISON activists
received popular attention during this
era. George Jackson’s writings raised the pos-
sibility that Black Power held the keys to
transcendence for the thousands of blacks
who remained in prison.40 Angela Davis, a
philosopher, activist, and committed Marxist,
was instrumental in publicizing the condi-
tion of black prisoners, a stance that led to
her incarceration during the early 1970s.
Written at the height of black political radi-
calism and state-repression, Angela Davis: An
Autobiography (1974) stands out as a narrative
history of Davis’s political journey and one of
the rare works that gave full voice to the role
of black women during the Black Power era.41
More expansively, Toni Cade Bambara’s semi-
nal anthology The Black Woman (1970) pre-
sented a tour de force analysis of the intersec-
tion of race, class, and gender that would
shake the foundation of the black, women’s,
and leftist movements in America. Written
amidst the Shockwaves of late 1960s political
unrest, James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street
(1972) reflects both the author’s and the era’s
increasing radicalization amid the Black
Power movement. Critiquing American lib-
eralism as a sham, Baldwin attacked American
foreign and domestic policy:
Now in the interest of the public peace, it is the
Black Panthers who are being murdered in their
beds, by the dutiful and zealous police. But, for a
policeman, all black men, especially young black
men, are probably Black Panthers and all black
women and children are probably allied with
them: just as, in a Vietnamese village, the entire
population, men, women, children, are consid-
ered as probable Vietcong. In the village, as in the
ghetto, those who were not dangerous before the
search-and-destroy operation assuredly become so
afterward, for the inhabitants of the village, like
the inhabitants of the ghetto, realize that they are
identified, judged, menaced, murdered, solely
because of the color of their skin. This is as curi-
ous a way of waging war for a people’s freedom as
it is of maintaining the domestic peace.44
Baldwin was not the only radical to highlight
the contradictions of American public policy.
James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolution-
aries (1972) elevated the craft of autobiography
to new political and theoretical heights while
highlighting the ideological vibrancy and para-
doxes of the era. Black Power’s radical human-
ism transformed progressive elements within
the black church. Albert Cleage’s Black Messi-
ah (1968) and Black Christian Nationalism
(1972) articulated the philosophy of black lib-
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eration theology that attempted to remake the
black church into a vehicle for black radical-
ism.46 The Black Arts movement was personi-
fied by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal’s edited
anthology Black Fire and the works of Black Arts
pioneers Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madubuti, Askia
Muhammad Toure (Roland Snellings) , and
Nikki Giovanni.4 The diversity of black radical
political thought was well represented in Floyd
Barbour’s edited anthology, The Black Seventies
that included essays by James Boggs, Larry
Neal and Margaret Walker.48 The second stage
of Black Power Studies displayed a remarkably
critical analysis amid rapidly transforming
political and historical developments. By the
mid 1970s as the fires of urban rebellion and
political dissent moved once more to the
fringes of the American political arena, Black
Power Studies entered a period marked by
autobiographies and political analysis that
characterized the period as more tragedy then
triumph.
The Third Stage: A Hopeless History?
third set of works related to Black
Power were written after the movement’s
highpoint. The years following the decline of
black political radicalism witnessed the pub-
lication of two first-rate studies that chroni-
cled Black Power labor radicalism. Dan
Georgakas’s Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study
in Urban Revolution (1975) is a case study of
the efforts of black labor radicalism in Detroit
during the Black Power movement. Detroit’s
radical labor movement was also the focus of
James Geschwinder’s compelling study Class,
Race and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revo-
lutionary Black Workers (1977).50 During this
era, from the mid-1970s through the mid-
1990s, autobiographies by ex-Panthers contin-
ued to gain notice. Bobby Seale’s A Lonely
Rage (1978), Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobi-
ography (1987), Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power
(1992) and David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory
(1993) all complicated one-dimensional nar-
ratives of the Black Panther Party.51 The works
by the exiled ex-Panther and Black Liberation
Army member Shakur and former Panther
chairwoman Brown, in particular, shed light
on the “masculine decade” of the 1970s in
ways that more provocative works such as
Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of
the Superwoman (1978) failed to do.5 Although
during the 1980s historians stressed the legacy
of the movement in such works as Manning
Marable’s Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race,
Class Consciousness and Revolution (1981), Black
American Politics: From the March on Washington
to fesse Jackson (1985), and African and
Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to
Maurice Bishop (1987), it was not until the
1990s that there was a full scale attempt to
analyze the movement as a whole. William
Van DeBurg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black
Power Movement and American Culture. 1965-
1975 (1992) examined the Black Power era’s
impact on American popular culture. While
groundbreaking in many ways, New Day in
Babylon failed to deal with the postwar radical-
ism that precipitated the Black Power era dur-
ing the height of Cold War liberalism substan-
tively. Moreover, similar to many narratives
during this stage, the movement is viewed as
ephemeral, effectively disappearing as quickly
as it came into being. The notion that the
Black Power movement destroyed the more
pragmatic Civil Rights movement cast a pall
over narratives of Black Power during this era.
Even relatively sympathetic works cast the era
as a hapless and hopeless history of black
American radicalism.5
The Fourth Stage: No Apologies
most recent stage of Black Power
Studies has provided the most rigorous,
sustained, and in-depth historical analysis of
the period. Historian Komozi Woodard’s A
Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones) & Black Power Politics (1999) is the best
book written to date about the era.
Woodard’s narrative successfully documents
the national and international implications
of Black Power politics through an examina-
tion of Newark, New Jersey. A Nation Within a
Nation, a case study of Black Power politics in
a major northeastern city, is a political biog-
raphy of Amiri Baraka, and a political analy-
sis of the interaction between black and
African and Afro-Caribbean anti-colonial
radicals during the early 1970s. Finally, A
Nation Within a Nation documents the victo-
ries and failures of Black Power nationalism
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on urban machine politics during the heyday
of black nationalism.5 Woodard’s narrative
presents the Black Power era as a complex
mosaic that combined cultural politics, grass-
roots organization, electoral power, and for-
eign affairs, to dramatically reshape Ameri-
can society and redefine the role of black
Americans in domestic and world affairs.
Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert E
Williams and the Roots of Black Power
(1999) breaks new ground by substantively
examining Robert F. William’s racial mili-
tance during the age of civil rights. During
the late 1950s and early 1960s, mass move-
ments in Southern cities such as Birming-
ham, Alabama, became the center for non-
violent civil rights protests. Tyson rightfully
underscores traditions of self-defense within
the black community and the way in which
Williams’s exploits garnered international
attention to the devastating effects of white
supremacy in the American South through
what is primarily a case study of Monroe,
North Carolina. Still, historians know too lit-
tle of the impact and influence of black radi-
cals in Northern, Midwestern, and Western
cities during this period.58 Pre-dating Stokely
Carmichael’s and Willie Ricks’ defiant decla-
ration of Black Power during the 1966
Meredith March Against Fear, the political
writings and activism of black radicals during
the civil rights era provide the immediate
theoretical and practical framework that
much of Black Power radicalism would uti-
lize (both consciously and unconsciously) in
a series of experimental efforts to redefine
black politics.
The Black Panther Party, already the focus
of an impressive number of political mem-
oirs, continues to receive the most sustained
scholarly analysis. Charles Jones’s edited
anthology The Black Panther Party Reconsidered
(1998) is the most comprehensive, historical,
and balanced work on the Black Panthers.59
Examining the party’s relationship with the
New Left, its internal contradictions, sexism,
and struggles with state-sanction subversion,
The Black Panther Party Reconsidered places the
Panthers enduring legacy within a historical
framework. Liberation, Imagination, and the
Black Panther Party, edited by Kathleen
Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (2001) places
the organization’s legacy within both a
domestic and global context. Historian
Yohuru Williams’s Black Politics /White Power:
Civil Rights, Black Power and the Black Panthers
in New Haven (2000) broadens discussion of
the Black Panthers by examining the politi-
cal milieu that predated and precipitated
their emergence in New Haven, Connecticut
in 1969.
61
Williams’s analysis of the New
Haven Black Panther chapter reveals the
importance of the Panthers’ free breakfast
and other social programs in gaining the
group local support. Interest in the Panthers
remains high and continues to be the subject
of recent journalistic accounts such as Jack
Olsen’s biography of Gerónimo Ji Jaga
(Elmer Pratt).62
Rod Bush’s We Are Not What We Seem: Black
Nationalism and the American Century (1999)
places the black radical tradition in a sweep-
ing historical and analytical context.63 Bush
argues that the Black Power movement rep-
resented a serious and sustained threat to
American hegemony. We Are Not What We
Seem is notable for highlighting the interna-
tional dimension of black liberation strug-
gles, specifically Malcolm X’s growing ties
with African revolutionaries. This theme is
even more pronounced in Mike Marqusee’s
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit
of the Sixties (1999).
5
By examining Muham-
mad Ali’s political journey during the 1960s
and early 1970s (and his close relationship
with Malcolm X) , Redemption Song casts the
black liberation struggle as an international
phenomenon that attempted to systematical-
ly transform democratic institutions in and
outside of America’s domestic borders.66
As has been discussed above the current
stage of Black Power Studies both builds on
and stands out in contrast to previous stages.
Most notably, the new works “reperiodize”
black liberation struggles by examining the
ways in which black radicals influenced black
politics during the “heroic period” of the
Civil Rights movement. In studying the Black
Power movement as a two-decades long
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struggle for black liberation (1954-1975),
these recent studies are contributing to the
reconceptualization of conventional civil
rights narratives. Finally, by highlighting the
period’s understudied themes (black
women, internationalism) and figures (for
example Robert Williams and Vicki Garvin),
this fourth stage has irrevocably altered
clichéd narratives of the Black Power era.
The X Files: Toward a Historical Framework
of the Black Power Movement
study of Black Power must be placed
in the context of the historical develop-
ment of postwar black radicalism. Black radi-
calism during the war years reached a high-
point with anti-colonial efforts reverberating
the world over.6 Cold War liberalism eviscer-
ated much, although not all, of this radical
energy. Black radicals continued to refuse
and resist American bromides regarding
democracy throughout the 1950s. Some,
such as Richard Wright, did so while in exile
in Europe. Others continued to fight the
good fight at the local level throughout the
U.S. International events, especially the Ban-
dung Conference, African liberation in
Ghana, the Cuban Revolution, and the
Congo Crisis provided the groundwork for
the coming Black Power movement. Histori-
ans need to know the full impact that these
events had on black radicals in the U.S. For
example, the political exploits of activists,
journalists, and intellectuals who lived over-
seas, such as the groups of exiled black radi-
cals in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana is only now
beginning to receive sustained scholarly
attention. The fruits of this research will
doubtlessly enhance our understanding of
this era. Ruth Reitan’s The Rise and Decline of
the Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders
in the 1960s is a useful, though by no means
exhaustive, examination of the close rela-
tionship between blacks and Cuban radicals
during the civil rights era.70 An in-depth
analysis of African-American support for the
Cuban Revolution will shed much needed
light on the effects that international events
had on domestic racial dissent during the
early years of the Civil Rights movement.
OF BLACK POLITICAL RADICALISM
usually skip the early years of the Cold
War preferring to view black liberation strug-
gles as either quiescent or submerged under
the stranglehold of anti-Communism. Timo-
thy Tyson’s biography of Robert Williams
reveals a far more complicated and contested
Southern civil rights landscape. More case
studies are needed that focus on strategies of
self-defense that reveal currents of black radi-
calism that existed within and outside of both
the Southern and the broader Civil Rights
movement. 2 A deeper understanding of the
Black Power era must also investigate the
activities of radical black youth who were
73 influenced by Malcolm X, anti-colonial
struggles, and through participation in radi-
cal cultural and political organizations such as
the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)
and the Afro-American Association. For
example, organizations as diverse as the US
organization and the Black Panthers were
rooted in RAM and the Afro-American Associ-
ation. During this era the Nation of Islam
had a direct impact on many militant stu-
dents, especially through the anti-colonialism
of its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Black stu-
dents formed study groups and cultural orga-
nizations in an effort to carve out a space and
place for black political radicalism. These stu-
dents would play important roles in radical
politics in Detroit, the South, the Bay Area,
and the Northeast by forging relationships
with an older generation of radicals that
included James and Grace Lee Boggs, Queen
Mother Moore, Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr., and
Malcolm X. One of the best narratives of
black student radicalism during the early
1960s is found in Grace Lee Boggs’s autobiog-
raphy, Living For Change. This riveting work
examines the way in which black radicals con-
structed an international network of contacts,
study groups, and political organizations that
stretched from Detroit to London to Ghana.
In addition to much needed biographical
studies of activists such as James and Grace
Lee Boggs, special attention needs to be
placed on the black radicalism in Detroit that
flowered through the automobile industry,
the Shrine of the Black Madonna and Rev.
Albert Cleage, Jr., as well as the activities of
local black college students.
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Black Student Unions (BSU’s)
and organizations such as the Student
Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), which
proliferated during the late 1960s and early
1970s, African-American student activists
played a pivotal role in the Black Studies
movement before the formal arrival of Black
Power ideology in cities such as Detroit,
Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York and Oak-
land. While San Francisco State officially
gave birth to the Black Studies movement in
1967, similar movements occurred at Cornell
University and elsewhere. A fuller study of
this movement (which took place in high
schools as well) and its relationship to local
and national Black Power organizations and
leaders is needed. Black Power advocates
produced literally thousands of books, pam-
phlets, position papers, journals and other
publications. A careful examination of this
intellectual production will go a long way
toward delineating the theoretical diversity
and practical underpinnings of the move-
ment. Furthermore, the pivotal role of
independent black think tanks such as the
Institute for the Black World (IBW) will bet-
ter illuminate the connection between black
radicals, intellectuals, and public policy dur-
ing the Black Power era. The IBW served as
host to a group of international scholar-
activists including C.L.R. James and Walter
Rodney. Both of these scholars influenced
mayor portions of the movement in the U.S.,
Africa, and the Caribbean. These intellectu-
als significantly altered the thinking of many
activists on issues related to nationalism,
class struggle and imperialism and provide a
fruitful focus for exploration.
The African Liberation Support Commit-
tee (ALSC) brought together several dynam-
ic strands of Black Power radicalism through
a focus on class, culture, and colonialism.
Eventually this spectacularly successful orga-
nization deteriorated into at least three
camps that variously advocated class struggle,
culture, or some combination of these
approaches. Yet the ALSC’s dazzling, albeit
brief, history deserves careful historical
attention for successfully exporting anti-
imperialist awareness to the masses of
African-Americans through African Libera-
tion Day (ALD) and the close political and
intellectual relationships forged between
African and Caribbean radical activists and
intellectuals. We need a better understand-
ing of the implications of this rich cultural
and political exchange that flourished under
the auspices of the ALSC. Just as crucial will
be an investigation into the turn towards
class struggle that made an impact on black
radicals during the early 1970s. The shift to
the Left by political activists including Amiri
Baraka sent Shockwaves throughout the radi-
cal movement and requires special attention.
While this shift was in part based on the
rejection of petit-bourgeois nationalism that
made black political control in cities such as
Newark a pyrrhic victory, it was based as
much on emerging political events in Africa
and the Caribbean that crystallized debates
over systemic change versus radical reform.
Rethinking the Black Power Movement:
New Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Van DeBurg’s New Day in Baby-
lon remains one of the few full-length
studies of the Black Power era. Van
DeBurg’s ambitious, and highly flawed,
account of Black Power truncates the move-
ment’s substantive challenge to American
racism, Cold War liberalism, and anti-colo-
nialism in favor of an overly glib narrative
that focuses on style over substance.83
Nonetheless, New Day in Babylon ‘s focus on
the impact of culture warrants further histor-
ical attention. The Black Arts movement
shaped, and was shaped by, domestic and
international events that encapsulated black
protest during the 1960s and 1970s.
While recent scholarship has shed light
on the political role played by Black Arts pio-
neers such as Amiri Baraka, important fig-
ures including Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal,
Askia Toure, and Nikki Giovanni have not
received enough attention.84 Monique Guil-
lory and Robert C. Green’s anthology Soul:
Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure provides a
useful retrospective of the cultural politics of
the era. 5 Julius Thompson’s Dudley Randall,
Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in
Detroit, 1960-1995 (1999) is an important and
much needed analysis of Detroit’s Black Arts
86 movement. However, Thompson’s instruc-
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tive study focuses particularly on the impor-
tance of Broadside Press as a vehicle for the
Black Arts, rather than the significance of
the Black Arts themselves.
Suzanne
E. Smith’s Dancing in the Streets:
Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
(1999) examines the interaction between
black cultural production and political
activism in Detroit during the black libera-
tion era. Skillfully resisting false dichotomies
between culture and politics,88 Dandng in the
Streets illustrates the way in which black cul-
tural production shaped and was shaped by
black radicalism that swept through the
Motor City during the 1960s. Smith imagina-
tively chronicles the historical context that
accompanied Motown’s ascendancy in a
rapidly transforming black community wit-
nessing increased labor radicalism, student
activism, and independent political and cul-
tural organizing. Dandng in the Streets stands
out as a major work that provides a potential
framework for future studies related to the
Black Arts movement.
The Black Arts revolutionized the rela-
tionship between black politics and culture
on a level that equaled, and arguably sur-
passed, the Harlem Renaissance’s influence
on the New Negro radicalism of the 1920s.
The movement produced important, though
often short-lived journals, including Cricket,
Umbra, The Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dia-
logue and Black Theater. Additionally, radical
cultural workers published in political jour-
nals such as the Liberator, Soulbook, and Black
America, that were read by poets, artists, and
other cultural producers. A comprehensive
study of the Black Arts and its effects on local,
national, and international liberation move-
ments will broaden historical comprehension
of the connections between black cultural
90
production and politics during this era.
Black Arts movement, however, rep-
resented far more then the push for
black access to predominantly white institu-
tions. Rather, it was part of a full-scale
attempt to transform American democracy.
On this score, Black Power’s quest for elec-
toral access through grassroots led political
coalitions represents a centerpiece for Black
Power Studies. Both the spectacular success
and the rapid decline of these coalitions
illustrate the opportunities found and lost
during this remarkable period in American
history. As Komozi Woodard’s case study of
Newark’s Black Power movement exempli-
fies, local radicals held important sway in the
political fortunes of the emerging black
political elite during the Black Power era.
Yet, as Adolph Reed Jr. asserts in Stirrings in
the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era
(1998), black radicals were often short-
changed by their alliances with emerging
black urban political machines.9 More
research is required to know why, and to
what extent, was this the case. Promising
work on Black Power’s impact on local poli-
tics in New Haven and Oakland illustrates
the benefits of using paradigms related to
political theory and urban space re-
spectively.93 Moreover, Black Power activists
formed national organizations such as the
African Liberation Support Committee
whose breadth stretched beyond American
borders into Africa and the larger Third
World.94 While A Nation Within the Nation
focuses on a specific Black Power organiza-
tion in a unique city, future case studies
would do well to follow its focus on the local
implications of the movement, while keeping
sight of its broader impact.
Power’s tortured relationship with
black women has obscured the force
and power of black women activists during this
era. Tracye Matthews and Angela D. LeBlanc-
Ernest have complicated Black Panther Stud-
ies by examining the contested roles occupied
by female Panthers.95 Despite the high number
of biographies of the Black Panther Party
there is no full length historical study of Black
Panther women. New scholarship on the BPP
must focus on local chapters and the group’s
relationship to Panther-derived organizations
such as the Young Lords. Case studies will pro-
vide a clearer picture that may explain the
fierce loyalty that many female members held
for the organization despite the organization’s
controversial gender politics.
In this regard, Margo V. Perkins’s Autobiog-
raphy as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties
(2000) examines Black Power’s gender politics
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through the autobiography of movement
icons Angela Davis, Elaine Browne, and Assata
Shakur.96 Perkins’s innovative analysis utilizes
the tools of literary criticism to examine the
role of autobiography in representing the gen-
der politics of the era. Such studies point to
interdisciplinary analyses that, with thick his-
torical scholarship as a foundation, may pro-
vide creative contributions to Black Power
Studies. Recently other scholars have focused
on the influential role of black feminist orga-
nizations that carved out important political
space during the Black Power era.
More provocatively, Joy James’ Shadowbox-
ing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics
(1999) challenges the “revolutionary icons”
of the era, specifically that of female Black
Power advocates.98 Taken together, such stud-
ies combat narratives that view black women
as solely victims of sexism during this era or
erase their very existence as important and
political agents of change. Black Power
scholarship must also examine the move-
ment’s growing incorporation of gay and les-
bian activism through activists such as Bar-
bara Smith and organizations such as the
Combahee River Collective.
Recent
journalistic Accounts regarding
the unjust imprisonment of Black
Power radicals provides historians with fer-
tile ground for future investigation.” Black
Power politics galvanized black prison
inmates during the late 1960s and early
1970s. This prison radicalism sparked a radi-
cal prison movement whose chief spokesper-
son, George Jackson, was a legend among
prison leaders throughout the U.S. Indeed,
Jackson’s death in 1971 added fuel to the
already incendiary prison conditions that
erupted in the Attica prison uprising later
that year. An icon during the heady and des-
perate days of the early 1970s, Jackson has
been the subject of journalistic examinations
but no full length historical biography. His-
torical studies of the Black Prison movement
can provide a better understanding of the
relationship between black radicals and
prison intellectuals. Moreover, such studies
may illuminate the impact that issues related
to prisoner rights (death penalty, jury repre-
sentation, adequate legal aid, illegal prosecu-
tion based on individuals’ political beliefs)
had on a variety of Black Power organiza-
tions. Kenneth O’Reilly’s Radal Matters: The
FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972
(1989) has documented illegal subversion of
Black Power advocates, especially the Black
Panther Party. The allegation that dozens
of black radicals remain political prisoners to
this day has been virtually ignored by profes-
sional historians. A more comprehensive
study of Black Power will critically examine
the role of underground organizations such
as the Black Liberation Army (BLA) that
were comprised of black revolutionaries
attempting to respond to state-violence
through the use of arms.
The Black Power movement’s influence
on labor, poor people’s, urban uprisings,
and community control movements also
requires further study.104 Detroit’s revolution-
ary labor movement, while the subject of two
case studies, deserves further detailed atten-
tion. The impact of media coverage, distor-
tion, and silencing of Black Power activists
and organizations requires further explo-
ration. The movement’s tense relationship
with the New Left, while the focus of much
speculation and idiosyncratic memoirs, has
received little substantive attention.106 Black
Power transformed local and national social
movements that concentrated on the black
poor and community control of the ghetto.
More investigation is needed to better under-
stand the extent of Black Power politics on
Great Society anti-poverty efforts, Communi-
ty Action Programs, educational reform,
housing and welfare rights activists.107
Finally,
the study of Black Power ideology,
its decline in the public sphere, and its
continued resonance remains woefully inad-
equate. Rod Bush’s We Are Not What We Seem
provides a cogent analysis of radical political
thought during the 20th century. The study’s
major strength is in complicating static char-
acterizations of black nationalism. Bush
bypasses race versus class clichés by arguing
that black nationalism has contained a simul-
taneous race and class analysis. Somewhat
more pessimistic then Bush, but still utilizing
Black Power political radicalism as a point of
departure is Robert C. Smith’s We Have No
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Leaders: African-Americans in the Post Civil
109
Rights Era (1996). Black Power advocates
articulated philosophical positions that con-
tained aspects of nationalism, historical
materialism, feminism, and democratic liber-
alism, sometimes simultaneously. While
Black Power declined in the public political
sphere amid torrents of racial, political, eco-
nomic, and cultural oppression, black radi-
calism continued into the 1980s with organi-
zations such as the National Black United
Front (NBUF), the National Black Indepen-
dent Political Party (NBIPP), and the Pro-
gressive Black Student Alliance (PBSA).
Finally, oral histories will go a long way
toward teasing out the complexity of key
Black Power activists and critics.
NEED HISTORICAL STUDIES of black
political thought and practice during
the Black Power era. Such studies can, of
course, utilize iconic symbols as vehicles for
analysis.111 Perhaps more useful however, will
be those that focus on previously unexplored
activists, cultural workers, and intellectuals.
Historians need to know how black political
radicalism differed and converged, depen-
dent on geographical location, political orga-
nizations, and historical circumstances dur-
ing this era. The influence of African and
Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and activism
must also be explored. Black political
thought during the age of Black Power can
be usefully situated within the context of
Africana thought and the global black libera-
tion struggles that swept across the Third
World during this period.11 A more holistic
approach to the study of black politics since
the postwar era will explore the implications
and aftermath of Black Power on urban poli-
tics, black nationalism, black feminism, and
African-American leadership and intellectu-
als.113 Such narratives of love and war should
detail the personal and political motivations
that inspired black radicals. Too often, his-
torical accounts, while ostensibly about peo-
ple, are crafted as “cold histories” that like
the Dragnet television series, ask for “just the
facts.” Feelings of love and humanity
emboldened youthful activists during this
era and should be a part of historical recon-
structions of this period. Furthermore, such
narratives need to include discussion of the
psychological, emotional, and physical
effects of Black Power activism. In many
instances activists experienced severe trauma
that had a lasting impact on their lives.
Conclusion
A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
jljl for the Black Power movement must
focus on the dynamic relationship between
local, national, and international political
organizations, leaders, intellectuals, and cul-
tural workers. Black Power was, in many
ways, a series of creative political and intel-
lectual experiments that varied depending
on political geography, social class, gender,
and political ideology. Black Power was both
a radically humanistic anti-racist social move-
ment and an outgrowth of growing disaffec-
tion and disappointment with the Civil
Rights movement. Civil Rights historiogra-
phy too often castigates the Black Power era
as a betrayal of the supposedly halcyon days
of the non-violent Southern movement.
However, black militancy existed side by side
with civil rights protesters, and sometimes
within single organizations. Moreover, the
civil rights era contains some of the bloodiest
anti-black confrontations in American histo-
ry, reflecting the dissonance between the
non-violent practice and state-sanctioned vio-
lence faced by the grassroots.
Placing Black Power in a historical frame-
work requires recovering the individuals and
organizations that influenced masses of stu-
dents, cultural workers, and leaders during
the “heroic” age of civil rights. This will not
be as difficult as it may seem. Black radicals
actively constructed an infrastructure whose
legacy, through Black Studies, revolutionary
journals, and study groups, is still in exis-
tence. Expanding narratives of civil rights to
include black radicals resists foreshortened
time-frames that identify Black Power as a
post-1965 phenomenon. The decade of
explicit Black Power radicalism also chal-
lenges narratives of 1960s radicalism that cast
1968 and the destruction of the Student for a
Democratic Society (SDS) as the end of the
New Left. Black radicalism, despite whole-scale
political subversion and state-sanctioned ter-
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ror, increased exponentially after 1968. Para-
doxically, under the aegis of a reactionary
Nixon presidential administration and a fray-
ing liberal coalition, black radicalism reached
its highpoint during these years.
Power Studies must also redefine
contemporary analyses of the post-Black
Power era. Usually referred to as the “post
Civil Rights” era, the last quarter-century of
the black movement should be analyzed with-
in the context of the demise of the radical
black liberation era that preceded it. This
era has been marked by both increased black
representation and social, economic, and
political demonization. Most contemporary
analyses of black urban politics, electoral
strategies, and continued anti-racist political
activism gloss over or ignore the legacy of the
Black Power movement. In many ways, attacks
on Affirmative Action, welfare reform,
increased incarceration, and police brutality
can be viewed as responses against the Black
Power movement’s attempt to radically trans-
form American and global civil society. Con-
versely, radical organizations centered around
issues including poverty, racism, sexism, and
incarceration, such as the Black Radical Con-
gress and thousands of local and national
grassroots political groups serve as a testament
to the era; they continue to organize and
protest amid the overwhelming forces of glob-
alization and reaction.116 Finally, Black Power
Studies can provide important historical analy-
ses for a wide range of disciplines that incorpo-
rate studies of race, class, gender, the Third
World, criminal justice and culture. Placing
the Black Power movement in a historical con-
text will start the long overdue process of
chronicling a story whose implications, in
many ways, are continuing to unfold.
Endnotes
1. The thick historical scholarship on the Civil Rights
movement has failed to seriously explore black radicals
who existed during this era. Even accounting for the
Southern focus of this literature does not explain the
failure for most scholars to explore the black militancy
that existed side by side (sometimes within single orga-
nizations) with the mainstream movement Two excep-
tions are Timothy Tyson’s case study of Monroe, North
Carolina and Yohuru Williams’s study of New Haven,
Connecticut. See Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie:
Robert F Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and
Yohuru Williams, Biadi Politics/White Power: Civil Rights,
Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (New
York: Brandywine Press, 2000).
2. See for example David Horowitz, “Black Murder Inc.”
Heterodoxy, March 1993; Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of
the Panther: Huey P. Newton and the Price of Black Power in
America (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Peter
Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Sec-
ond Thoughts about the Sixties (New York: Summit Books,
1989) ; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Deconstructing
the Left: From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (Lanham, MD:
Second Thoughts Books, 1991).
3. The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in works
published by, and about, 1960s based black political rad-
icals. Examples will be discussed throughout this essay.
4. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka
(LeRm Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1998); Charles Jones, ed.,
The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black
Classic Press, 1998); Peniel E.Joseph, “Waiting Till the
Midnight Hour: Reconceptualizing the Heroic Period
of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965,” Souls, Vol 2,
no. 2 (Spring 2000): 6-17; Rod Bush, We Are Not What
We Seem: Black Nationalism and the American Century
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); Williams,
Black Politics/White Power, Mike Marqusee, Redemption
Song: Muhammad AU and the Spirit of the Sixties (London:
Verso, 1999); Tyson, Radio Free Dixie. In addition to
these works, a number of recent dissertations, from a
variety of intellectual disciplines, have analyzed the
Black Power era. For example see Scot Brown, “The US
Organization: African American Cultural Nationalism
in the Era of Black Power, 1965 to the 1970s,” Ph.D.
Diss., Cornell University, 1999; Dean Errol Robinson,
“To Forge a Nation, To Forge an Identity,” Black
Nationalism in the United States, 1957-1974,” Ph.D.
Diss., Yale University 1995; Kimberly Springer, “‘Our
Politics was Black Women’: Black Feminist Organiza-
tions, 1968-1980,” Ph.D. Diss., Emory University, 1999;
Matthew J. Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power
in Philadelphia, 1940-1971,” Ph.D. Diss., Duke Universi-
ty, 1999; and Peniel E. Joseph, “Waiting Till the Mid-
night Hour: Black Political and Intellectual Radicalism,
1960-1975,” Ph.D. Diss., Temple University, 2000.
5. See for example Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC
and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1981); Aldon Morris, The Origins
of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing
for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984); Belinda
Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women
in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997) Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Free-
dom: The Organizing Tradition and The Mississippi Freedom
Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the
Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973) David Garrow, Bearing the Cross:
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leader-
ship Conference (New York: William Morrow and Compa-
ny, 1986).
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6. For the impact of the Cold War on black radicals see
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Anti-Colo-
nialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
7. Timothy Tyson’s biography of Robert F. Williams under-
scores this point. See Tyson, Radio Free Dixie.
8. Robin D.G. Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Prob-
lem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal
of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1045-
1077.
9. See Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record Of Reaction in
a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1954) ; The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Confer-
ence (New York: The World Publishing Company,
1956); and White Man Listen! (New York: Doubleday &
Company, 1957).
10. Wright, The Color Curtain, pp. 11-12.
11. Wright, White Man Listen!, pp. 1-24.
12. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (1958; Boston: Beacon
Press, 1988), p. 28.
13. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York:
Marzani and Munzell, 1962). This book had a major
influence on, among many others, future Black Pan-
ther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton.
14. James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro
Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1963).
15. By radical humanism I mean the growing conceptual-
ization during this period that African-American were
engaging in a struggle for human rights that redefined
civil rights struggles as an international struggle against
exploitative and racist practices that compromised
human dignity on a global scale.
16. Calvin Hicks, On Guard, Vol. 2, no. 2, May 1961.
17. See for example Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage: The Autobi-
ography of Bobby Seale (New York: Time Books, 1978);
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, CT:
Lawrence Hill and Company, 1987); Elaine Brown, A
Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1992); David Hilliard and Lewis Cole,
This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1993).
18. Stephen Steinberg characterizes radical publications
during this era as compromising a “scholarship of con-
frontation.” See Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The
Liberal Retreat from Racial Justice (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995), pp. 55-85.
19. John Edgar Wideman, “Introduction,” Mumia Abu-
Jamal, Live From Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley,
1995),p.xxxii.
20. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black
Power. The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1967) , p. vi.
21. Ibid., p. 166.
22. Ibid., p. 37.
23. Author’s interview with Mohammad Ahmed (Max
Stanford), December 18, 1999.
24. New York Times, November 21, 1967.
25. According to Cruse’s political and historical analysis,
African-Americans have alternated between adhering
to Western (white) ideology or foreign (Carribean)
black ones, rather than constructing a political practice
based on the unique experiences of black Americans.
See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New
York: William Morrow and Co.,1967), pp. 115-146.
26. For criticism of Cruse’s depiction of West Indian radi-
cals see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentiäh-Century
America (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 262-291. See for
example Julian Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade: A Chal-
lenge to A Bestseller” pp. 5-6, Julian Mayfield Papers,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New
York Public Library.
27. Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Inteüedual, p. 564.
28. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America
(1969; New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990), p. 177.
29. Ibid., p. 182.
30. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages
from a Workers Notebook (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1970); and James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolu-
tion and Evolution in the 20th Century (New York: Month-
ly Review Press, 1974) .
31. See Joseph, “Waiting till the Midnight Hour,” pp. 200-
250.
32. See for example Ernest Kaiser, “Recent Literature on
Black Liberation Struggles and the Ghetto Crisis,” Sd-
ence and Society (Spring 1969) .
33. See for example Gail Sheehy, Panthermania!: The Clash
of Black Against Black in One American City (New York:
Harper Row Publishers, 1971).
34. August Meier, John Bracey, and Elliot Rudwick, eds.,
Black Protest in the Sixties (1970: New York: Markus
Wiener Publishing, Inc., 1991); A more successful
attempt that highlighted key black radical documents
of the era was John H. Bracey, Jr. ‘s, Black Nationalism in
America (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc., 1970), pp. 403-554.
35. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: Dell Books,
1968).
36. Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), Die Nigger Die! (New
York: Dial Press, 1969).
37. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther
Party (1968; New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
38. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
39. See Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People (New York:
Random House, 1972); (with Erik H. Erikson), In
Search of Common Ground (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1973); and War Against the Panthers: A Study of
Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press,
1996).
40. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of
George Jackson (1970; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books,
1994); Blood in My Eye (1971; Baltimore: Black Classic
Press, 1990).
41. Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974;
New York: International Publishers, 1988).
42. Toni Cade Bambara, ed., The Black Woman: An Antholo-
gy (New York: The New American Library, 1970).
43. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1972).
44. Ibid., p. 131.
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45. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries
(1972: Washington, D.C.: Open hand Publishing,
1985).
46. Albert Cleage, Jr., Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1968); Biadi Christian Nationalism: New Directions
for the Black Church (New York: William Morrow & Co.,
Inc., 1972).
47. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, Black Fire: An Anthology of
Afro-American Writings (New York: Morrow, 1968).
48. Floyd B. Barbour, The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter
Sargent Publishing, 1970).
49. Dan Georgakas, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in
Urban Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975).
50. James Geschwinder, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency:
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977) .
51. Seale, A Lonely Rage; Shakur, Assola, Brown, A Taste of
Power, and Hilliard, This Side of dory.
52. Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Super-
woman (New York: Dial Press, 1978).
53. Manning Marable, Bkukwater: Historical Studies in Race,
Class Consciousness and Revolution (Dayton, Ohio: Black
Praxis Press, 1981); Black American Politics: From the
March on Washington to Jesse Jackson (London: Verso,
1985); and African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame
Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop (London: Verso, 1987).
Adolph Reed provided a very critical look at the legacy
of the movement within the larger context of the poli-
tics of the 1960s. See Adolph Reed Jr., Race, Politics,
and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986).
54. William L. Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon: The Black
Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
55. Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 292-308.
56. Woodard, A Nation within a Nation, pp. 159-218.
57. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, pp. 81-89.
58. An exception is Williams, Black Politics/White Power.
59. Charles Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered
(Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).
60. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Liberation,
Imagination and the Black Panther Party (New ‘brk: Rout-
ledge, 2001).
61. Williams, Black Power/White Politics.
62. Jack Olsen, Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph
of Gerónimo Pratt (New York: Doubledav. 2000).
63. Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism
and the American Century (New York: New York Universi-
ty Press, 1999).
64. Ibid., pp. 175-192.
65. Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Aü and the
Spirit of the Sixties (London: Verso, 1999) .
66. Ibid., pp. 162-252.
67. Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans
and Anti-Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
68. See for example the special issue of Social Text, “Dossier
on Black Radicalism,” especially Kevin Gaines, “Revisit-
ing Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the
Dialectics of Diaspora,” Social Text 67 (Summer 2001),
pp. 75-101.
69. Kevin K. Gaines, “African-American Expatriates in
Ghana and the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls Vol. 1,
no. 4 (Fall 1999) , pp. 64-72 and From Black Power to Civil
Rights: African American Expatriates in Nkrumah’s Ghana
(forthcoming); For an autobiographical account see
Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
(New York: Random House, 1986).
70. Ruth Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Black
Leaders and the Cuban Revolution (East Lansing: Michi-
gan State University Press, 1999).
71. Peniel E.Joseph, “Where Blackness is Bright?: Cuba,
Africa, and Black Liberation During the Age of Civil
Rights,” New Formations, (forthcoming) . For a fascinat-
ing look at the aftermath of the revolution see Carlos
Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles:
UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1988) .
72. Charles Eagles calls for a more balanced and objective
study of the Civil Rights movement. In a literature
review of the historiography of the southern move-
ment, Eagles cites professional historians’ vicarious sup-
port for and, at times, actual participation in, civil
rights struggles as an impediment to a more complex
history of the era. See Charles W. Eagles, Toward New
Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” The Journal of Southern
History, Volume LXVI, No. 4, (November 2000): 815-
848.
73. Malcolm’s political internationalism, usually character-
ized as a belated development, was crystalized in the
hearts and minds of Black Harlemites with his famous
meeting with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. With few
exceptions, historians have failed to note the impor-
tance of this meeting or connect it to the hotbed of
black political radicalism that existed during the age of
civil rights. Rosemari Mealy has collected the remem-
brances of key activists and leaders who were a part of
this historic meeting. See Rosemari Mealy, Malcolm X
and Fidel Castro: Memories of a Meeting (Melbourne:
Ocean Press, 1993).
74. Kelley and Esch, “Black like Mao,” and Joseph, “Wait-
ing Till the Midnight Hour.” A first hand account of
the Afro-American Association can be found in the
autobiography of the group’s founder Donald Warden.
See Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour (Donald War-
den) , Black Americans at the Crossroads: Where Do we Go
From Here! (New York: The First African Arabian Press,
1990), pp. 70-75.
75. See Scot Brown, “The US Organization, Black Power
Vanguard Politics, and the United Front Ideal: Los
Angeles and Beyond,” in this issue.
76. See Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change: An Autobiogra-
phy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998),
pp. 117-189.
77. Donald Alexander Downs’ recent study of Cornell’s
Black Studies movement views the struggle for Black
Studies as an issue of free speech that ultimately
destroyed the liberal American university in favor of a
new political orthodoxy – political correctness –
backed by guns and militant rhetoric. This short-sight-
ed view exemplifies the need for rigorous analyses of
Black Power politics and its influence in the creation of
contemporary Black Studies. See Donald Alexander
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Downs, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the Ameri-
can University (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
78. Over twenty years ago Darwin Turner criticized white
literary critics for failing to read the works of black
poets, writers, and cultural critics. Turner’s admonish-
ment can certainly be extended to professional histori-
ans who have ignored the works of black radical writ-
ers, poets, intellectuals, and activists of the Black Power
era. See Darwin T. Turner, “Introductory Remarks
about the Black Literary Tradition in the United States
of America,” Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 12, no.
4 (Winter 1978): 140-147.
79. The term “Black Power literature” should be expansive-
ly defined to incorporate periodicals that at first blush
may fit outside this definition. This would include
papers such as Correspondence, the Guardian, and the
Illustrated News.
80. See Stephen Ward, “Scholarship in the Context of
Struggle: Activist Intellectuals, the Institute of the Black
World (IBW), and the Contours of Black Power Radi-
calism, 1967-1970,” in this issue.
81. This is especially significant in light of the underlying
anti-Communism that permeated aspects of black
nationalist thinking popularized by Harold Cruse. If, as
is often asserted, Cruse’s polemics turned young mili-
tants “off” from class struggle, what accounts for the
increasing Marxist-Maoist-Leninist thinking of groups
of black radicals (in addition to the League of Revolu-
tionary Black Workers) that caused splits in groups
such as the ALSC? We need case studies of these splits
and their impact on Black Power politics.
82. Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon.
83. Ibid., p. 156.
84. See the posthumously published Larry Neal, Visions of a
Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989).
85. Monique Guillory and Robert C. Green, Soul: Black
Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York Univer-
sity, 1998).
86. Julius E. Thompson, Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and
the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1999) .
87. Suzanne E. Smith, Dandng in the Streets: Motown and the
Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard Universi-
ty Press, 1999) .
88. The false dichotomy between politics and culture dur-
ing this era needs to be obliterated. For many cultural
workers their was no distinction. For example the radi-
cal poet Askia Muhammad Toure (then Roland
Snellings) met Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) at a 1961
United Nations protest concerning the assassination of
Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. Author’s interview
with Askia Muhammad Toure, February 8, 2001.
89. Smith’s excellent account places culture squarely in the
realm of politics and in so doing delineates the rich
political, cultural, and intellectual gumbo that trans-
formed Detroit’s black community during the era of
black liberation. Smith, Dandngin the Streets, pp. 1-180.
90. Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric
Modernism and Twentieth Century American Poetry
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000),
pp. 118-144.
91. Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation, pp. 91-113.
92. Adolph Reed, Sürrings in the fug: Black Politics in the Post-
Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), pp. 117-159. Reed’s otherwise insightful
critique of the movement is hampered by an analysis
that see Black Power radicalism as an a priori failure
and utilizes historical excavation to justify this perspec-
tive.
93. Williams, Black Politics/White Power, and Robert Self,
“To Plan Our liberation:’ Black Politics and the Poli-
tics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965-1977,”/0ur7ia/
of Urban History, Vol. 26, no. 6 (September 2000): 759-
792.
94. Williams, Black Poütics/White Power, pp. 173-180.
95. Tracye Matthews, “vNo One Ever Asks, What a Man’s
Place in the Revolution Is’:Gender and the Politics of
the Black Panther Party 1966-1971;” and Angela D. Le
Blanc-Ernest, “‘The Most Qualified Person to Handle
the Job:’ Black Panther Party Women, 1966-1982,” in
Jones, ed., The Black Panthers Reconsidered
96. Margo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black
Women of the Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2000).
97. Kristin Anderson-Bricker, “Triple Jeopardy,’: Black
Women and the Growth of Feminist Consciousness in
SNCC, 1964-1975,” Kimberly Springer, ed., Still Ufing,
Still Climbing (New York: New York University Press,
1999), p. 60.
98. James specifically analyzes the symbolism and iconogra-
phy attached to Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Assata
Shakur and Elaine Brown. See Joy James, Shadowboxing:
Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 93-122.
99. The story of Black Panther leader Genonimo Pratt’s
twenty-seven years of incarceration has been the subject
of a riveting account. Olsen, Last Man Standing, Lori
Andrews, Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times of
fohnny Spain (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996).
100. Two such accounts are Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed
George fackson? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); and
Paul Liberatore, The Road to Hell: The True Story of George
fackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre
(New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996). See also
Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fou, of Californias Radical
Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994).
101. Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: TheFBVs Secret File on
Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: The Free Press,
1989). See also Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall,
Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black
Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston:
South End Press, 1988).
102. Two exceptions are Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The
Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Pris-
oners,” and Akinyele Omawale Umoja, “Set Our War-
riors Free: The Legacy of The Black Panther Party and
Political Prisoners,” in Jones, ed., The Black Panther
Party Reconsidered. The case of death row inmate and ex-
Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has been the most
publicized case of the incarceration of dozens of Black
Power radicals. See Mumia Abujamal, Live From Death
Row (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995); and Noëlle
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Hanrahan ed., All Things Censored (New York: Seven
Stories, 2000).
103. During the late 1960s and early 1970s dozens of black
radicals were incarcerated and charged with a laundry-
list of crimes. Trials with names such as the “Wilming-
ton 10” and the “Panther 21” were infamous during
this era. We need detailed case studies surrounding
these and dozens of other cases during this period.
104. Gerald Home’s study of the Watts uprising provides a
good framework for the study of black urban rebellions
during this era. See Gerald Home, Fire this Time: The
Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1995).
105.Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying and Geschwinder,
Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency. See also Ernest Allen,
Jr., “Dying From the Inside: The Decline of the League
of Revolutionary Black Workers,” in Dick Cluster, ed.,
They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: Seven Radicals
Remember the Sixties (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
106. A noteworthy exception is Nikhil Singh, “The Black
Panthers and the ‘Underdeveloped Country’ of the
Left,” in Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered,
pp. 57-105.
107. For an example of Black Power radicalism’s impact on
local urban activism see Rhonda Y Williams, “‘We’re
tired of being treated like dogs’: Poor Women and
Power Politics in Black Baltimore,” in this issue. See
also Jane Anna Gordon, Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Cri-
tique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in
Ocean Hill-Brownsville (1967-1971) (New York: Rout-
ledge-Farmer, 2001); and Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville,
Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Nature of the Ghetto
(forthcoming).
108. Bush, We are Not What we Seem, pp. 83-120.
109. Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African-Americans
in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: SUNY Press,
1996).
110. See for example “Van Gosse interview with Harold
Cruse,” Radical History Review, Vol. 71, (spring 1998),
pp. 96-120.
111. The two that immediately come to mind are Malcolm
X and Martin Luther King, Jr. William Sales’ exem-
plary account of Malcolm X and the Organization of
Afro-American Unity places the era in a wider historical
context. See William W. Sales, Jr., From Civil Rights to
Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-
American Unity (Boston: South End, 1994); and Michael
Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr. (New York: The Free Press, 2000).
Jerry Gafio Watts’s recent study on Amiri Baraka fol-
lows his intellectual and political journey from the
1950s through the 1980s and spends considerable time
exploring Baraka’s impact on the Black Power move-
ment See Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics
and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2001 ).
112. On this score scholars would do well to examine the
impact of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabrai,
and Walter Rodney on Black Power activists. Historical-
ly, Africana thought examines the political writings and
activities of diasporic blacks (African, Afro-Caribbean,
African-American) as a prism for critical engagement.
See for example Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood: With
Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (Chica-
go: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994); Cedric Robinson,
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972); Lewis R. Gordon,
Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995) and Existentia Africana: Understanding
Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge,
2000); Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introdudng Afro-
Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000); Joy
James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and
American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997);
Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the
Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994);
Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., On Race and Philosophy (New York:
Routledge, 1996); Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and BiUie
Holiday (New York: Random House, 1998); Clarence
Lusane, Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the
Millennium (Boston: South End Press, 1998). The inter-
national dimensions of Black Power Studies are enor-
mous. At times Black Power will be a leitmotif for an
exploration of the relationship between state power
and international independence movements. See for
example Gerald Home, From the Barrel of a Gun: The
United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
113. For a discussion of the impact of the post Black Power
era on contemporary African-American intellectuals
see Peniel E.Joseph, “‘It’s Dark and Hell is Hot’: Cor-
nel West, the Crisis of African-American Intellectuals,
and the Cultural Politics of Race,” George Yancy, ed.,
Cornel West: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
2001).
114. Nowhere is this more evident then in the treatment of
radical black prisoners including Gerónimo Pratt and
Mumia Abujamal. In both celebrated cases, the prose-
cution utilized their past involvement in radical politics
as justification for their contemporary incarceration.
See Olsen, Last Man Standing, and Abujamal, Live From
Death Raw.
1 15. Smith, We Have No Leaders; A riveting fictional account
of the connections between the Black Power move-
ment and the contemporary period is found in
Michael Simanga, In the Shadow of the Son (Chicago:
Third World Press, 2000) .
116. Sundiata Chajuá and Clarence Lang, “Strategies for
Black Liberation in the Era of Globalization: Retronou-
veau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and
Radicalism,” The Black ScholarVol 29, no. 4 (Fall 1999):
2S47.
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- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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The Black Scholar, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (FALL/WINTER 2001) pp. 1-84
Front Matter
Black Power Studies: A New Scholarship
Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement [pp. 2-19]
The US Organization, Black Power Vanguard Politics, and the United Front Ideal: Los Angeles and Beyond [pp. 21-30]
“We’re tired of being treated like dogs”: Poor Women and Power Politics in Black Baltimore [pp. 31-41]
CORRECTION: CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS [pp. 41-41]
“Scholarship in the Context of Struggle”: Activist Intellectuals, the Institute of the Black World (IBW), and the Contours of Black Power Radicalism [pp. 42-53]
NO HAVEN: FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK POWER IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT [pp. 54-66]
THE BLACK SCHOLAR BOOK REVIEWS
Review: untitled [pp. 67-68]
THE BLACK SCHOLAR BLACK BOOKS ROUNDUP #26 [pp. 69-77]
THE BLACK SCHOLAR CLASSIFIED [pp. 78-83]
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS [pp. 84-84]
Back Matter